Is Facebook Really for B2B Marketers?

The short answer, in my opinion, is no, and the changes that Facebook has just made to the way pages are used and viewed only reinforces my opinion.  Facebook is now measuring the "relevance" of your feed.  And "relevance" has nothing to do with how relevant YOU think your post is, and everything to do with the level of engagement your audience has with your post by virtue of liking, commenting, and sharing. 

Jeremy over at Never Stop Marketing did a nice job of explaining the changes in his recent post, "How Facbook Just Transformed Brand Marketing."  For the B2B Marketer, it's time to ask the serious questions.  I suspect that many companies have a Facebook page just so they have a Facebook page.  I venture to guess that there are hundreds, and maybe even thousands, of FB pages that have less than 200 and perhaps even less than 100 "likers." Many of these pages post in obscurity, hoping against hope that someone (anyone) will take a moment to comment, share, or, dare I say it... "like" the post.  The situation is so awful that someone dreamed up a company that offers "likes for hire," where their professional Facebookers will go to client's pages and "like" posts or offer comments.  (I believe I have seen some of those pages, and most of the comments are inane to say the least.) 

B2B companies need to step back and define the purpose of their Facebook page.  The serious questions:  What is the real reason you want to be on Facebook?  What is the audience you seek?  Is Facebook capable of supporting your goals?  What do YOU do when YOU go on Facebook?  Do you expect others to do the same, or something different?

There are several areas of focus that make sense for B2B companies to explore more thoroughly:

1. Employee engagement.  Use Facebook as a platform for your corporate culture.  Post news items that will be relevant to your team members, photos of company social activities, compelling news of the day or week.  Share important announcements, case studies, press releases, and good news.  Don't share confidential stuff, of course, and be cautious about naming your clients and/or employees (or tagging them in photos).
2. Potential employee engagement.  Use Facebook to show off your company as a great place to work.  All of the suggestions above will seamlessly re-purpose your posts into fodder for your recruiting engine.  By targeting for one purpose, you automatically target for the other.
3. Partner engagement.  If you are an organization that has partners who represent or sell your products or services, you may be able to successfully engage with your partners through Facebook.  However, I don't believe you can easily mix a Partner Engagement goal with the first two focus areas above.  Your FB page will become fragmented and its identity lost.  You also need to think about whether your partners are using Facebook as a resource for business information.  They might just be looking for new pictures of their distant cousins and not really engaging with your page at all.

The key word in each of the focus areas of above is "engagement."  With the new Facebook rules, if you don't write engaging posts with which people will interact, no one will ever see your posts anyway.

What do you think about the new rules?