On Wednesday, Facebook announced a new way for brands to grow their fanbases by using email contacts to build your Facebook Page.
Now, from a brand perspective, this sounds great and it sounds like a fantastic way to reach individuals who are already interested in your brand and who just may not know about your presence on Facebook.
However, given my email marketing background, alarms have been going off in my head about whether or not this new development will alienate customers on your email contact lists.
Out of sheer curiosity, I tested this new Facebook tool and found a few things that made the email marketer in me a bit worried.
Although this new tool can expose your email customers to your Facebook presence and all of the great content you have there, there are a few things that might deter your email customers from even opening this email or agreeing to join you on Facebook.com.
- As a Page administrator, you are currently not allowed to personalize the message that you send to your email address list - not allowing brands to convey to the recipients why it is beneficial to them to join their Facebook Pages.
- The email message itself states that the brand Page wants the email subscriber to join Facebook.com, not the online community of the brand that they love.
- When the email arrives in the recipient’s inbox, there is no clear indication from the subject line that the email is from Facebook — the subject line just indicates the name of the Facebook Page. This leaves too much room for an email subscriber to be confused by who the email is from, especially if they are not Facebook users.
These issues could be large deterrents to individuals joining Facebook or joining your brand Page. And even for those who are already Facebook users, who may be comfortable with Facebook, they may not appreciate an impersonal and unconvincing email from Facebook in regards to your brand Page.
Is there room for improvement? Definitely. And if Facebook does indeed improve this tool to lend itself to be more enticing to the actual email customers, it may not come off as “spam-like” to your email contact list and lend itself to the growth of your fanbase and further integration of your online marketing channels.
What do you think? Do you believe that this new Facebook tool can boost a brand’s Facebook fanbase? Will it maintain the integrity and trust that brands might have with their email contact lists? Or may it do more harm than good in its current state?
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