A page on Facebook is a must-have marketing tool for every business. But there are advantages to building a social media page outside of Facebook's walls.
For small, new companies, drawing friends and fans outside your personal group of Facebook friends can be difficult. And those who do "like" the page may not see the company's updates on his or her news feed, because Facebook uses a formula that only shows updates from 250 friends and pages that the user interacts with the most.
So if Susy "likes" Bob's Frozen Yogurt Shop, she likely won't see the shop in her news feed unless she interacts with that page once in awhile.
Building a social network Web site in addition to a Facebook page can be handy for a young organization to reach out to more eyes. One free way is Grouply.com; it combines old-school listserv groups with modern social networking. Although Grouply is a sliver of the size of Facebook, it is a good option for beginners (even though it includes ads on your page to pay for its costs).
Grouply lets you quickly create a page without needing to know any Web programming language. Administrators can insert features like a wall for comments, videos, marketplace, calendar and can easily mass e-mail members.
Members of your business' page don't ever have to go to Grouply if they aren't into social media. They have the option to participate solely through e-mail. That gives business owners the chance to reach members with different communication preferences.
Grouply also imports groups from Yahoo and Google and gives them a social network page makeover -- and the groups are not deleted from Yahoo or Google.
The best known alternative for creating your own community page is the simple-to-use Ning.com. But the build-it-yourself social network site announced in April that it is no...
Posted: 2010-08-20 10:31:44
