Facebook seem to be constantly rolling out new features at the moment. A few weeks ago they allowed administrators of Facebook Business Pages to post material as the page on other people/businesses walls. This meant that you could potentially access new markets to pass on your message.

There is a flipside to this though and that is that other pages could now post material to your wall and appear in your fans newsfeeds. With everybody being able to post anything pretty much anywhere for free then you do not have to be a genius to realise that there is the potential for an awful lot of spamming to go on.

In fact for those that attempt to use Twitter for marketing purposes think about what your Twitter stream is like. Everybody’s talking but does anyone actually listen? How much engagement actually takes place on Twitter? My Twitter stream appears to be full of links to articles that I have little or no interest in.

I suspect that Facebook were fearful that their social media platform would turn into the worlds largest spam site and that in turn user engagement for the site as a whole would drop. With this in mind Facebook have now enabled page admins to be able to not just remove a post but to also ban the user, even if that user is a business page.  I posted something earlier to my business page so that I could demonstrate the sort of options that you now have.

I think that this is a smart move for Facebook. The social media giant have always said that they will never charge people to become part of Facebook and, therefore, they need to be able to talk about their large user base to be able to attract the advertisers they need to become a sustainable business long term.

In the same way that Google gets search so Facebook gets social. Although both do make mistakes from time to time they both realise that the service needs to be free for users and that it needs to provide high quality content.

If your companies Facebook marketing strategy has previously been to just post the same message on hundreds of other pages then now might be the time to think again. However, as much as I applaud what Facebook has done I do feel that it will only be a matter of time before Facebook spammers just use different ways to go about their business, such as setting up multiple profiles that are tied to spoofed email addresses. This does not mean that I think we should just accept spam, on the contrary we all have to work at just making things that little bit more difficult for the spammers to operate so that it is not quite as cost effective for them to operate.

I would love to hear about your own experiences of using all forms of social media as a marketing tool, feel free to leave a comment or two!