Assess Your Social Networking Strategy

As first reported but my friend Darcy over at The Business of Diving, Facebook has now provided dive shops who inadvertently started using a facebook personal profile as a business with a way or converting their pages over to a business page.

Facebook is doing more and more to add more functionality, specifically for small businesses, and all of that functionality is focused on the page. There are a lot of differences between profiles and pages, which makes pages absolutely the only way for your dive center to get a lot of value out of Facebook.

Now that facebook has provided this functionality to convert pages; to me it signals that they are going to start cracking down on this as using fB this way as it is a violation of their terms of service.

What’s funny is a lot of dive shops are still making this mistake and still setting up profiles and wondering why they’re not getting the same visibility or the same functionality and things like that, the same analytics, for example. So that’s definitely one of those pieces – one of the most common mistakes.

I’d hate to see the DEMA profile or any other dive center deleted by facebook. It would not go un-noticed by web savvy dive operators and reflect poorly on the organization.

Here's some key things to remember:

• When you convert your profile to a Page, some content will be automatically transferred for you.
• All your confirmed friends will be converted to people who like your new Page.
• Your profile pictures will be migrated to your new Page.
• All other content on your profile (i.e., photo albums, profile information, etc.) will not be transferred. Be sure to save any important content before beginning your migration.

Source: Facebook

If you're using Facebook in this way I really hope you'll take advanvantage of this before you are either required to or you just see your page locked or even worse deleted.

Personally, I think that users will initially have their accounts frozen and afforded the opportunity to migrate their accounts first before being deleted. I have no knowledge of this but it makes sense for Facebook to do it this way.

Think of this as an Opportunity

This also affords you with the opportunity to really think about Why you have a Facebook page or a Twitter account and what the best way to move forward with your Social Media efforts. Or if you already have a business page, it's probably not a bad time to reasess your strategy and see if what you're doing is working.

Dive Centers, like many small businesses jumped on the the social media band wagon without really knowing why or how and took the "We'll Figure it Out Later" approach. With spring now here in the northern hemisphere, here's a few things for you to think about when evaluating what you're currently doing or want to do with Social Media.

There's 4 basic steps to aligning social media with your dive centers business objectives: Strategize, Organize, Implement and Promote.

Let's just talk about strategy for a minute because if you skip this key step you're more than likely setting your efforts up for failure.

Dive Center Strategy

Using Facebook, Twitter or any other Social Media Channel IS NOT a strategy. These are tactics or tools that help implement your business and social media strategy.

What's the Purpose: You need to know why you want to use social networking before you start using it.

• Lead Generation
• Community Outreach
• Brand Awareness
• Grow a community of Brand Evangelists
• Traffic to your Website
• Highlight Local Diving Opportunities
• List Your Own Great Idea Here

Sales will come. If your sole purpose is to use the hard sell, advertising classes and dive gear then use adwords. Facebook users will see through these glaring attempts and just click ignore or unlike.

The WHY will determine the HOW. For example a local dive center will more than likely need a different strategy than either PADI or DEMA.

This seems blatantly obvious right? If so, then explain to me why most dive centers on twitter do nothing more than follow other dive centers instead of searching out people in their own local area to interact with?

If you've skipped this whole strategy thing, now's the perfect time to give it some thought and make any needed changes to how you are approaching Social Media and the dive industry.

Next time I'll talk about some ways to Organize; until then Happy Strategizing!