Facebook: We should avoid a debate as to whether or not Facebook has yet to reach its peak, has peaked, or whether or not it has already begun its decline due to the recent push from Google+ (Plus) to slowly destroy it. Also, a debate will be avoided as to whether or not Facebook’s interest in its users’ privacy is at the level which it needs to be.
This article is aimed at discussing the potential of Facebook as a type of Content Management System (CMS). The rate at which businesses are embracing social media, and Facebook in particular, is still on the rise. Even though Facebook provides a mature structure for building business pages, there is still much confusion among new small business owners.
Facebook offers a few different types of business pages, each of them having additional subcategories, are as follows:
- Local Business or Place: for small businesses with a single physical location
- Company, Organization or Institution: for larger chains, franchises, or non-profit institutions
- Brand or Product: to promote specific products or brands
- Artist, Band, or Public figure: for a single person or group of people
- Entertainment: for entertainment industry-related entities
- Cause or community: for non-profit organizations and groups
The list is clearly redundant, there is some overlap, but clearly the category “Company, Organization or Institution” leaves the most room for growth and certainly has a large, trusted, professional feel from the client point-of-view.
With categories such as Computers and Technology, Consulting and Business Services, Food and Beverages, Internet and Software, Media, News and Publishing, Non-Profit Organization, Retail and Consumer Merchandise, School, Small Business, Telecommunication, Travel and Leisure, surely there is a suitable category for almost any small business wanted to create a business page.
Despite Facebook effort to provide a way for businesses to create, or even convert their personal identity into a business pages, businesses often setup their business pages by creating another “person” profile,
even though it is not the recommended way. Despite this fact, the ease of use in which Facebook’s users can upload photos directly from their iPhone, Android, Blackberry, or other smart phone is astonishing. Practically in real time, the photos are added to and appear instantly in the albums. Also, promotional messages, in the form of status updates, are easily done with a simple SMS message sent from the user’s verified phone number to the number that Facebook supplies.
Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, the leading three open-source content management systems, all have various plugins, extensions, and integrated tools to allow for the remote management of a corporate websites, but if the initial steps were not done to set everything up, then the most probable outcome is that these CMS’s will never be used in the full extent that Facebook could be used to update and manage both the corporate web presence and social-media campaign.