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.

Having a Facebook page or a Twitter profile isn’t a means to an end. And simply stating that you want to “engage with your community” doesn’t count as a strategy. Engagement isn’t a strategy. It’s barely even an objective.

You wouldn’t just create a website for your brand. You wouldn’t start an advertising campaign without knowing first why you are advertising, who you are advertising to and what effect you want your adverts to cause. And you certainly shouldn’t start an advertising campaign as a silo; it needs to belong to a wider strategy that considers brand, tone of voice and long term goal. The same needs to be true of your ventures into social media, you need to plan for success.

Facebook and Twitter are channels, tactics, and you need to understand their role and place these tactics in your broader communications strategy. Until you are ready to do this, you probably should not set up a Facebook page or a Twitter profile

As such, the industry tends to suffer from buzzword mentality, jumping from one buzzword theory to the next. One term in particular that has stuck is community marketing, upon which many other loosely developed theories have been built. In fact, the term has become fundamental to how many in the social media industry think about their work and sells it in to clients. “You need to engage your community!” self pronounced social media experts (read social media douchebags) decry, probably because someone writing for Mashable has told them so.

The problem is most brands don’t have communities. Some brands have amassed large numbers of fans on Facebook, but the mere act of becoming a fan of a brand on Facebook does not mean that the user wishes to participate in any community or join in with any conversation about that brand. A Sausage Roll fan page with 10,000 fans does not mean there is a Sausage Roll community; it simply means that 10,000 people are saying they like Sausage Rolls.

Regardless of how many fans it has, a simple Facebook page is not a community; a community is made by its members and the sense of belonging they create for themselves. The real problem, of course, lies with marketers. They have taken the term, raped and abused it so much that they have stripped it of the connotations that first attracted us in the first place: a group of likeminded individuals brought together by their shared interests connecting with each other, and, hopefully, with the brand.

Marketers are using this watered down term and using it to raise the hopes of their clients, telling them that community engagement is the key to success. Clients need to have their reality checked. The problem with clients is they are their brands’ own biggest fans. They think their brand of toilet cleaner is the best, and are willing to shout it from the rooftops. And that’s great; they need to be that enthusiastic in order to sell the product. But as marketers we have to manage their expectations, make them realise that no one else is going to give a crap about their toilet cleaner, even less want to join an online StainBeGone community. They but the product because they want their stains gone, not because they want a relationship with the brand. Sure, they may become a fan on Facebook, (probably more for novelty value than anything else) but don’t misinterpret the signals like a socially awkward teenage male thinking that’s there’s a relationship just because the girl you’re into acknowledged your existence.

This is not to say that online communities don’t exist, or that a Facebook fan page cannot be home to a community, just that as marketers we need to more realistically manage the expectations of our client. Community marketing is not a one size fits all, saviour for brands. There are some great examples of organically grown communities being improved by the brand carefully entering into and becoming a part of the community, such as the Harley Davidson fan club. In these cases the communities already existed before the brand joined them, and so the leg work was already done for the brand.

There are also great examples of brands developing their own communities by facilitating the communication between fans, and with the brand itself, such as the work done with the Guitar Hero community.

The moral of the story is not that it is impossible to create, or join an engaged brand community, but rather that when the social media come knocking at the door telling brands you that “you need to engage with your communities” take it with a pinch of salt.

It’s easy to see why they are doing this, the more friends you have on Facebook, the more likely you are to log in and the longer you are likely to spend using the site. The bottom line equates to more page views, and in turn, more advertising revenue.

Whilst this tool will likely be popular with those new to the site, looking to find friends they have long since lost contact with, it could prove annoying to long standing members who are already annoyed by Facebook suggesting friends for them, or suggesting people user’s don’t want to be friends with.

So, what are your thoughts, did you appreciate the suggestion box? Or did it annoy you?