Nearly every client of ours has or is in the process of creating a facebook page. These are the most common mistakes we see people make in maintaining their facebook fan page. Though we are talking about facebook mostly, these same principles can be applied to twitter, google plus, youtube, or any other social networking site.

Not Responding to People

Somebody sends you message to your page or writes on your page wall, and they never hear back from you. This is more or less the same as not returning phone calls or emails. Who knows, maybe you just lost some business by your lack of responsiveness.

Facebook has a pretty intensive notification settings system. You can be emailed when people write on your wall or send you a message to your page. Also, I would recommend turning off lots of other facebook notifications so you don’t have to worry about too many false alarms about silly things from facebook.

Post Hibernation

Hibernation is great, if your a ground squirrel, it’s less than ideal if you are a facebook page admin. I am not saying that you need a new facebook status every single day, not in the least. Pages that have not had a status update in 8 months though, can look stale, boring and not interesting enough to like.

Posting Frenzy

Frequently, inside of two post hibernation periods, you will see a posting frenzy, where six posts are made in twenty seconds. It would have been much better to spread those posts out some. Facebook will group those posts together, making it easy to ignore in the news feed. On top of that, people like short status updates, long ones or grouped ones are easy to skip.

Pay it Forward

You can’t talk about your self all the time. Don’t be afraid to talk about your customers. Are you a hardware store? Talk about a local chimney builder that frequents your business. Machine fabrication shop? Mention a lawn care business who you just fixed their trailer. You get the idea.

Why so Negative

Often times, it’s better to focus on an example of somebody doing it right, rather than doing it wrong. Check out the Bangor-Y for an example of doing it right.