If I’m going to spend time on Facebook replying to messages, writing on walls, and reading invitations to events, I want to see the whites of people’s eyes. And I want to know their names.
I won’t waste time responding to a company whose only form of identification is their logo.
I just completed Part 1 of today’s two-part teleseminar on “How to Use Facebook to Promote Your Business or Nonprofit,” and various forms of this question came up several times from people who participated in the call: “Is it OK if I use just my company logo instead of somebody’s photo on the profile page?”
You could. But why would you want to?
Social networking is all about transparency, joining in the conversation and sharing information. I’d rather talk to a person than a company. I’d rather see their photo instead of a company logo. It’s bad enough that many companies I do business with have lost the human touch. A human won’t answer the telephone. I get a form letter when I write to complain. When I email, I get an autoresponder message. This isn’t what I want on Facebook.
Social networking is all about building relationships online. It would take far longer for you to build a relationship with somebody if they didn’t know who you were. In fact, you’d be darn lucky if they even paid any attention to you. There are too many other interesting people on sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to waste time communicating with somebody who wants to hide behind a logo.
Does anybody know of companies or organizations that do the anonymous thing on Facebook and can pull it off?
I want to see faces and names, too, Joan. I don’t know why someone would want to be anonymous, but I’m not interested in connecting with them.
Along the same lines, I get a lot of Facebook invitations where the person doesn’t identify how we’re connected. They might be a blog or newsletter reader or a friend of a friend, but if they don’t say who they are in relation to me, I’m not very likely to connect.
It’s really Networking 101, isn’t it? But people who don’t know how to network offline aren’t going to do any better online.
Facebook also has a business listing side, it’s just not very easy to locate, in order to create one. So I’ve got a listing both for me as a person, and for my business. Trouble is, there’s no direct link from a personal to a business listing provided by Facebook (unless you just wanna type in the link in your “About me” or “Work” fields). Wouldn’t that make sense…! (As it is, I’m still unclear what Facebook’s intent for these business listings are.)
Joan –
Thanks so much for this posting. I could not agree more. I realize that many people are photo shy. . . heck! I cannot stand to have my picture taken, but networking is about getting to actually know one another and that is hard to do when you don’t have a face to a name.
Another reason people should consider putting their real faces up for all to see is that it is easier to remember you if you do. Isn’t that the point of social networking? There are many people out there and I am one of them, that have a hard time remembering names. When I have a visual (your picture) I am way more likely to remember you.
To your success!
Stephanie
Productive & Organized – We’ll Help You Find Your Way! tm