Separate territory fan pages are a bad idea for your brand
// July 30th, 2010 // No Comments » // Blog
Social media allows brands to communicate with new ways and on new levels with their customers. Facebook for example allows you to create a brand presence in a social space, allowing fans a deeper connection with the brand than ever before.
However, this new opportunity also brings with it challenges. What if fans of your brand speak more than one language and live in more than one country? Obviously you can’t communicate with people in a language they don’t speak, and also, it’s difficult to be relevant to users when you are trying to talk to users of multiple territories at once.
More and more it seems the default response is to completely separate the communications approach. Many brands choose to create completely separate accounts and pages for different territories and languages. On the face of it this solves the problem; different accounts solve any language barriers and ensure the content is relevant to each of the different territories.
There is an issue with ensuring that every communication is on brand and on message, but there is a bigger issue. As a fan of Product X people don’t want to communicate with Product X UK, they want to communicate directly with Product X. This can be seen from the fact that brands with one single page will have more fans than competitor brands with different pages for each territory, even when you combine the totals for the territories. Customers want to know they are talking to THE official brand page, and territory specific pages get in the way of this.
As Facebook has evolved, the need for separate accounts has diminished. In particular, targeted wall geoposting and location specific tab content allows the end user to get the tailored content the brand wants them to see, in a language they can understand, but with a brand identity they want to connect with. Using these features you can do away with the need for separate pages for the territories and have a single destination for your global brand on Facebook.
A note on other platforms
Of course other social media platforms are a way off this, with the notable example of Twitter, which does not allow this kind of targeted communication.
Facebook today rolled out notices at the top of the news feed section encouraging users to use their automatic friend finder tool. If you haven’t logged in yet today, you’ll be prompted to try out the tool with the notice that many of your friends have already successfully found friends using the tool. 
