You may have already been on the receiving end of one of my ‘mini rants by minihane’ about not spreading yourself too thinly online, you can’t be everywhere (especially as a small business with limited resources). Better to be on one or two sites and do them well than be half-baked everywhere – think about what brand message that is sending out.

Until today I had 2 Facebook pages for business, one for my small business advisory business and another called ‘4starters‘ for attendees on the ‘hands-on social media workshops that I run with Tim O’Grady. My small business advisory page is now closed after months of me arguing with myself – why I hear you cry? Well….

• I didn’t have the time to commit to making it a social experience for my followers with a really good reason for them to follow me.
• I just prefer other sites out there (e.g. Twitter, Google+) – and it showed with erratic posts that were fairly dry in nature. So different to how I am on, say, Twitter (imho!).
• Even though my target market were on Facebook, they didn’t really want to talk to me about business on there – many more people want to connect with me as a friend than like my page.
• To really boost my followers I’d have to look at (amongst other things) Facebook advertising – although a great tool, it’s not in my budget right now.
• It was stressing me out – knowing I was online somewhere and not updating it regularly risked me giving out a negative message about my business – I’m too busy but to a visitor it may look like I don’t care.
• A lot of my followers were family and friends – I love them all dearly but the majority aren’t my target market.
• For me, Facebook business pages only work for a small number of business types (that’s a whole different blog post) and mine didn’t fit one of the types.

So why not close down ’4Starters’ page too?

Simple, people are more social media-info hungry on social networking sites so the audience is more receptive plus it helps attendees on our course feel there is a way to keep in touch with us, post questions etc (granted they can do this on our 4Starters LinkedIn group too but more of our attendees are on facebook).

So have I cut off my nose to spite my face?

No, I still happily accept friend requests on Facebook (and use lists to manage who sees what so my privacy is still secure) and can push out the odd business message that way.

The Result?

I feel incredibly liberated and it’s one less thing to worry about, I can concentrate my energies where the return is greater, on both a professional and personal level.

 
I would love to know if you are considering whether to maintain your business page on Facebook, or whether you’ve carried out any kind of social media audit on your business?