Facebook Marketing: When is it Spam?

Following Friday’s post, I returned to ask Tanya Cottrell about when it’s appropriate to market to Facebook members by posting on members’ walls. Here’s what she had to say:

Great question. Your keyword was “unwanted”. If students are going
to travel to Europe they are more than likely not see any type of information
related to traveling to

Europe

as a spam. One
degree less would have the person write, “I know a lot of you may be planning
your trips in

Europe

and I recommend using
Ryanair.com over buying a Eurorail pass to save on money, time, and convenience
of traveling.” The person posting the wall post needs to be honest about
their identity and say who they represent when making the post so it isn’t
misleading.  Companies should not hire students to make postings on group
pages and work on behalf of a company. 

On the group pages there is an option to post the URL to a website
on the group page out and write some commentary underneath. It is not so much
you are trying to span the person but create awareness of this service for the
group members to check out. Companies need to realize just because you make a
wall post about your company’s deals doesn’t mean that it will turn into an
easy sale. The goal for an ad/link post is to create awareness of an option. As
long as the person making the post is ethical in disclosing if the
person works for the company it is ok. This is where a company Facebook account
can make the posting and also elicit friends for a group page on their
service/product. 

Here is an example of my posting:

As you can see Euro Adventures is a company who made a posting
which is effective. My posting came above about Ryanair.