Heather Baker explains how a poorly planned post can damage your brand.
Yesterday after work I logged in to my Facebook account only to be confronted by this monstrosity on my timeline.
I don’t object to sponsored stories. In fact, the promoted posts function on Facebook can be an extremely valuable way for a business to drive engagement and build its fan base. What offended me about this post was its failure to achieve anything positive at all.
I assume the point of the post was to get more followers to the Barclays Business UK Facebook Page. I have to make that assumption, because there is no clear indication as to the real purpose of the post – the call to action being “Join us & Engage”. It’s a tad vague, and even if I wanted to Join Barclays & Engage With Like Minded Business Communities to Boost My Reputation, I’m not sure I’d know how. I wasn’t the only person perplexed. I don’t think Tom Edward Phillips got it either:
Which brings me to the choice of image. I’m not sure how the image selected is supposed to support the idea of Engaging With Like Minded Business Communities to Boost Your Reputation. I racked my brain to understand this visual metaphor but somehow I just failed. Why does a man who has managed to break both pedals off his bicycle and is now presumably stuck in town for the day look so darn happy? Is it because he now has bicycle-wheel wings? Or is he just smiling in support of the photographer’s decision to rebel against the rule of thirds?
Then there’s the copy. Join us & Engage With Like Minded Business Communities to Boost Your Reputation. This is the bit that really annoys me. Barclays employs 140,000 people globally. Surely one of them was available to proof these 13 words before they were published? Just one sensible person would have been able to point out in under three minutes:
- There is absolutely no need to Capitalise Almost Every Word. This Is Not a Heading and We Are Not American.
- There is no need to use the ampersand here. It is grammatically incorrect. You could get away with it on Twitter because of the character limit. But this is Facebook and you can’t.
- Like Minded should be Like-Minded. Actually it should be like-minded.
- But you shouldn’t be using like-minded anyway, because business communities do not have minds and therefore cannot be like-minded.
I’m also not sure that you can Boost Your Reputation. I think the correct use of the verb would be Give your reputation a boost. But I’m not 100% sure myself, so I won’t penalise you.
So that’s four, maybe five, grammar errors in thirteen words.
It’s not just the grammar and the poor choice of image that infuriates me. It’s the fundamental lack of strategy behind this post that really gets me. Why is Barclays not incorporating Facebook into its wider marketing strategy? It’s kind of obvious to me that the organisation has a reputational issue to overcome. No company should be publishing content that is bland, vague and littered with errors. But a company with reputational problems should be taking extra care not to do this. Because the best case scenario is that your post will go unnoticed. But you run the risk that your post will inflame passions, which is sadly what happened in this case:
So what can we learn from Barclays Business UK?
Your social media activity should be embedded into your wider communications strategy and should be managed by someone competent, trained and plugged in to your business.
If you’re going to treat social media as an afterthought, you run the risk of embarrassing yourself and bringing your business in to disrepute. In my opinion, an abandoned Facebook page is less damaging than one that has been updated by someone who doesn’t ‘get’ your business. Use this rule of thumb: look at the person who has been given the task of updating your Facebook page and ask yourself: Would I be happy for this person to answer questions about my business for an article in the FT? If not, then you’ve got the wrong person managing your Facebook page!