I have a love/hate relationship with Facebook. Just like any sensible freelancer, I have business pages for both my copywriting and my travel writing and photography. And I dutifully post links to my current blog posts and articles, as well as respond to any posts on the walls of the pages.
But I’m wondering, if I made a full-bore effort to market these services on Facebook, what kind of marketing results would I get? I’m not so sure.
Facebook marketing appears to help already established businesses and ones everybody knows. It gives a human dimension to what can be perceived as monolithic corporation.
Yet, for a freelancer like myself, I think I’d probably do better on LinkedIn and even Twitter (still trying to figure out how to best use that one). It seems I would get more tangible results being on either one of these for self-marketing or prospecting.
Right now, I think Facebook is a great for connecting with people, real friends and virtual ones (by the way, isn’t it funny how we’ve redefined the concept of “friends” thanks to this social media outlet?). As for us small businesses, I don’t think it has much merit now. Maybe this new graphic search may change the game some and shake things up. But I still have to get off their waiting list to see if that’s the case.
Perhaps this is why I find the whole social media phenomenon so fascinating. It’s very much like a wild west frontier, where the rules are not quite known to everyone and seemingly anything can happen. For my own private life, I may not go too far and share a lot with even people I know really well. But with my businesses and for those of my potential clients, it’s wide-open.
And I’m itching to see what’s coming.
