marketing, internetI’m helping a friend to promote his Start-up by using Facebook, but he already created two Facebook pages, one personal and one official. Both have the same names. Now we are trying to figure out if this a good thing or not. Or if we could make something useful out of it.
Both accounts have a different number of likes, but there is quite a discrepancy between these figures, and we would like to merge both accounts in the future. A combined account is easier to manage and has the option for “Paid Promotion.”. We also think that we would be more coherent. But a question popped out while discussing it. The question was… why shouldn’t we keep both accounts? Obviously, it would be easier for us to have a single account, but now it’s kind of a tricky situation because of the number of followers (and hopefully clients one day).
Can anyone help us to understand what would be the benefits and disadvantages of having two accounts vs. a single account for getting to more potential clients? Can you at least provide us with an analogy to explain if there would be any marketing advantage to this?
I’m not sure if this is the right place to ask the above questions, but I saw that Economics SE doesn’t really match my tags, so please redirect me to another SE, if you think this one is not appropriate.
Methinks your main issue is using Facebook (FB) to being with. Because, long story short, FB likes to your page often work against you from the get go.
When FB promotes a post you submit, it shows it to a few of those who like you and depending on whether they engage with it they show it to more of them or kill it without further ado. The more unengaged users you have the worse you’re off, and the more users you have the more likely you are to have unengaged users. Takeaway: never promote FB posts, be it through odd legit or dark channels. Let actual fans show up organically.
One issue to be aware of in this respect as an aside, is that having likes from users in South and South East Asia is not a panacea, because they tend to use FB differently: they tend to like just about everything, not so much because they actually liked or supported it, but because they use the FB likes as a reminder that they’ve visited a page or not. And that’s fine at the end of the day, plus it’s the f’ing designers’ fault at FB for not making it clear what you’ve visited or not - it’s a healthy reminder for all designers out there of why you should do so.
But if you end up with loads of them liking you, whether because you’ve been promoting your posts or because your message is so obviously morally appealing that just about everyone likes you, then the FB business model gets turned upside down, and you end up getting weird engagement levels that basically work against you.
So don’t rely on it. Do your best to see to it that you’ve other venues for would-be clients
Don’t rely on Google either. You don’t want your business to depend on whether or not and how they change their search algorithms.
As to your actual question: if anything, having two FB accounts is a benefit in your case: it means you’ve more potentially engaged users on both channels, without diluting the user base. But do keep in mind the issue raised further up: the less engaged an audience, the worse off you are.
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