Not long ago, the prevailing wisdom about online strategy was to use your blogs, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc., to increase searchability and ultimately drive people back to your sales-machine of a website. It was kind of like dropping lines all over the lake so you could pull all the fish back to the boat.
In essence, the strategy was an online version of real-world strategies – a high-tech version of running an ad in a newspaper in hopes of drawing readers off their sofas and into your store.
The social web can work that way, but what happens when you make a point of going to your customers (clients, donors, etc.)?
Look at Best Buy’s Facebook page. They go beyond using it as a gateway to their home site. They even go beyond using it as a customer service tool.
With a custom “Shop + Share” tab, they invite fans to both shop and interact without ever leaving Facebook.
When you consider the growing number of people who use social sites like Facebook as their home pages, it behooves anyone with a social web presence to include this kind of engagement in their strategy.
What would your fans like to do on your Facebook page? What can you give them that they wouldn’t be able to resist sharing? Is there some way you could offer an authentic platform where your fans want to interact?