If used correctly, your business’ Facebook page can pull the weight of three team members: customer-acquisition assistant, brand-building partner, and customer service representative. And even if your business’ page is managed by one staff member (or by you on your smartphone), with the right know-how, your Facebook page could still do three jobs for your business. Here’s how to turn your Facebook page into the ultimate multitasker:
Lisa Raphael (left), the social media producer at Katie Couric's daytime talk show Katie, is one of our featured speakers in Mediabistro's upcoming Social Media Marketing Boot Camp, an online event and workshop starting June 6, 2013. Lisa will share a case study on how the hit show uses Twitter to build interest and buzz around upcoming segments. Learn more about our our twelve event speakers and register here. 
While some companies really know how to do Facebook marketing right, there are many others that are clueless. PostRocket wants to help the latter group. The company’s co-founder, Mike Maghsoudi, recently posted about five mistakes that he’s seen brands make on Facebook.
Customer service via social channels such as Facebook and Twitter, once considered an afterthought by most companies, has exploded of late, with Conversocial Co-Founder and CEO Joshua March telling AllFacebook in an interview, “Over the past year, 2012, so many people woke up. Suddenly, every company we spoke with understood that social customer service was important.”
Odds are you’ve liked a page on Facebook only to regret it a few hours or a few days later. Maybe it keeps posting about itself, or there’s no relevant material out there. Don’t be that page. Kevin Mullett, a social media and search-engine-optimization expert and the director of product development for Cirrus ABS, talked with AllFacebook about the biggest mistakes he’s seen companies make on their Facebook pages. Don’t worry, there’s still time to change for the better.
Chat may soon be where it’s at for small businesses that are confused about Facebook’s myriad advertising and marketing options, as TechCrunch reported that the social network is testing a system from Salesforce.com that allows page administrators to contact its customer-service department via chat.
Customer-service software provider Parature announced the beta launch of Parature Social Monitor, its method of allowing brands to monitor Facebook and other social networks for key customer-service issues and manage them through to completion.
Facebook is by far the top social network in terms of adoption by small and midsized businesses (SMBs), but its prospects for growth in that sector are dim, as it may have reached a point of saturation, according to the results of a survey of decision-makers at 400 SMBs by cloud marketing software provider Vocus and Duct Tape Marketing.
Cloud-based help desk software provider Zendesk announced that its Zendesk for Facebook now supports private messages.
Online retail rating service StellaService examined the Facebook practices of 20 top retail brands and, for the most part, found their customer service to be lacking.
VirtuOz is launching its first customer service engagement tool, also known as an intelligent virtual agents, for the social network.
