Facebook doesn’t get small businesses.
My New Year’s resolution for the wedding photography part of the business is to explore using social media to promote it. I read two great articles about photographers who are generating a lot of business from FB. Both suggested uploading wedding photos, tagging the bride and groom, and then sitting back while they go about tagging their friends. The photos go viral to friends of friends, many of whom are young and marriageable.
Seems easy, so I created a Facebook “Page” in order to accomplish this, since we don’t want to mix our personal profiles with the business, and FB says “Pages” are for businesses. Problem is, Pages have Fans, not Friends. They can’t invite Fans. They can’t tag their Fans. They can’t send Messages. So there’s no way to alert the bride and groom to the Page other than to email them a link or message them from my personal account. But that wouldn’t work anyway, because as far as I can tell, images posted by Pages can never be tagged, even by People.
I would be happy to pay Facebook for the privilege of sending an invitation to the bride and groom and the privilege of tag-ability, but that’s not possible. All I can pay Facebook for is an ad targeting a demographic – say, engaged women in their 20′s in Savannah. (Yes, we’re trying that too.)
So the reason I say Facebook doesn’t get small businesses is that it’s clear these rules exist to prevent giant corporations from spamming Facebook accounts. That’s great. But small businesses have actual relationships with their clients. If the local coffee shop wants to proactively reach out to me on Facebook, that wouldn’t piss me off, because I actually do know the owner. (Hi Kristin!)
The upshot is that I think this is a good idea for local wedding and portrait photographers to pursue, but you’re going to have to create a secondary personal page to do it. That’s what we did, and it is working – in 24 hours it generated 19 hits to our website.  FYI, you cannot call your new Person “Joe Smith, Photographer” or anything like that, because the algorithms catch that. So you’ll have two Facebook identities. (Which reminds me of the time my friend created two online dating profiles – one sexy and one quirky – and judged guys based on which they responded to, but that’s another story.)
Corporations are not people, but small businesspeople are. Facebook is missing out on a huge market by not allowing us to network directly with our clients. I feel bad not paying for for-profit use of the site; I think it’s akin to copyright violation, but I don’t see an alternative.
-Michelle
Update 1/16/12 – The answer may be a “Community Page”. Still probably technically against the rules, but at least it’s not a personal page. Someone can tag photos on community page once they like it.
