How many times have you heard some “expert” talk about building communities and getting into the conversation using Social Media. It seems like everyone is reading the same book and regurgitating the same nonsense.
To those so called “Experts” and “Guru’s” I say, “Show me the money!.”
Talk is cheap, so rather than tell you how great it is to build communities using Facebook Pages I thought it would be infinitely more interesting (not to mention believable) to SHOW you. In this post I’m going to take you through a little sample of what a working community looks like on Facebook.
This case study started last Sunday February 14th (Yep, Valentine’s Day.)
Love was in the air and I was taking my best girl (aka my wife) out to see Valentine’s Day (how cliche’) and then to dinner. As the lights dimmed in the theatre the announcement to turn off our phones was played. I reached into my pocket, grabbed my iPhone and I was just about to turn it off when I thought, “Let’s just take a quick look at Facebook before I disconnect.” To my surprise here’s what I saw:
How strange, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Referral Alert garner so much attention. My wife was threatening to kill me if I didn’t put away my iPhone, so solving this little mystery would have to wait until later.
A few hours passed before I was finally back at my computer ready to figure out what was going on. I signed into Facebook, opened my page and expanded the conversation to see this:
Yep, she really said that and it caused quite the little discussion amongst the people in our community. What was interesting was so many people banned together to let our friend MTL know this was not appropriate (the majority of the 42 comments at least.)
I’d like to tell you this is where the story ends, but this is just the beginning.
On Monday we posted out normal Referral Alerts and before we knew it MTL was back and causing quite a stir in the community. This time some of my friends were emailing me about the situation asking me what I was going to do about it.
To tell you the truth, I thought MTL was great. Her outlandish comments brought our community together and got more eyes on our page (Thanks MTL.) Alas, I knew they wanted me to do something, so I decided I’d shoot a video response to MTL’s comments. (To watch the video just click on the image below)
Now it’s easy to see the community was quite taken with this story when you look at the 78 *LIKES* and the 65 Comments. While most of the comments were humorous, take a look at this one:
What’s this have to do with building communities?
Looking at Wikipedia, a community is traditionally defined as a group of interacting people living in a common location. The word is often used to refer to a group that is organized around common values and social cohesion…
Judging by what we’ve just seen I’d say the Real Estate Referral Group meets the criteria to be called a community.
With that in mind I want you to take a step back and look at your Facebook Page. Does it meet the criteria to be considered a community? If not I urge you to rethink your strategy, because the power in Facebook is not the page or the platform, it’s the community.
Want to learn more about Facebook Pages?
I’ll be writing more about how to use Facebook pages in your online marketing efforts. Anyone can tell you how to put together a Facebook page, but how many of them can tell you what works…from experience? Make sure you subscribe to my feed so you don’t miss a thing.
