Facebook consulting explained

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Over the last year or so I’ve been asked to do an increas­ing amount of Face­book con­sult­ing. Most weeks I get a cou­ple of emails ask­ing for help and ask­ing how this sort of con­sult­ing works so I thought I’d explain my experience.

First off: Face­book is not all that hard. Putting a great-looking Face­book page up to sup­port your group, cause or school doesn’t require any pro­gram­ming. But it can be con­fus­ing, partly because Face­book is always in-process. They keep adapt­ing it and tweak­ing it. If you bought a book on Face­book cam­paign­ing a year ago, it would already be out of date.
My first job is to ask a few good ques­tions about what you want to do on Face­book and then set up the begin­nings of a site. I spend too much of my time already on Face­book but I also keep up with a lot of Face­book blogs and have recent copies of such won­der­ful tomes as “Face­book Mar­ket­ing for Dum­mies.” In most cases my job is to rec­om­mend a Face­book strat­egy based on best prac­tices and then to start up a Face­book Page for you. There are cer­tain flour­ishes I can give, such as pick­ing a good icon or mak­ing a cus­tomized tab for first-time visitors. But the real value of Face­book is clients shar­ing infor­ma­tion directly with their audi­ence so my most impor­tant work is get­ting you excited about doing it your­self. I’m really just a cheer­leader for you.
I typ­i­cally spend any­where from two to eight hours help­ing a client put together a Face­book page. If it looks like a project on the small end of the scale, I just charge the expected amount upfront. I do keep track of my time: if we go over a lit­tle bit, I let it slide; if we still have a bit of a bal­ance then I’m there for ongo­ing ques­tions. Face­book con­sult­ing is not the core of my busi­ness but it can be a nice break from a big six-month devel­op­ment project and it’s helps with the cash­flow. I’m also a nat­u­rally curi­ous fel­low so I like learn­ing a lit­tle bit about the kinds of things.