Facebook and PR

Once again, thanks to the PRSA daily email, Issues and Trends, I stumbled across another article about Facebook (article linked to title of post). I'm not quite sure how I feel about the article's content: using Facebook for PR.

I read the article, from the PR Newswire blog, and part of me wondered if I was using Facebook "wrong." In my opinion, I never thought of Facebook as a "professional" site. I think most people see Facebook as a personal, catch-up, play games and other stuff kind of site. I thought to myself, "should I be thinking of Facebook differently?"

Truth be told, I don't spend a great deal of time on Facebook. All the games and other "applications" on my Facebook page have gone virtually unused. I post links to blog posts. The article suggests placing an ad on Facebook. I have to be honest, while they aren't as evasive as they are on other sites; I tend to get somewhat annoyed by them.

On the other hand, the article also suggests that Facebook may not always be the right medium to use when it comes to PR. The author of the article, Sarah Skerik gave some suggestions. Skerik suggests to first find out who your audience is. And, on Facebook, that's hard to do. Of course, you can post poll questions on Facebook; however, you may not get the responses you're looking for nor responses from the right people.

If you do use Facebook for PR, what do you desire to gain out of it? Are you looking for traffic to your site? Seeking to gain awareness (which has become somewhat of a big deal on Facebook recently), or just to forge relationships? For me, anyway, I do post links to my new blog posts on Facebook, in hopes of generating more traffic. However, I really have no way of figuring out how many people click on to my blog directly from Facebook.

The bottom line, Skerik writes, is that it is OK to use Facebook for promotion. If it's used for more than that, be mindful of two things: your audience and your message.

I've tried to do those things recently with this blog. I've changed the title of this blog-as well as the focus of the articles, to hopefully generate a bigger audience. I'll always be interested in writing about sports and its correlation with marketing and PR.

Realizing that was a pretty slim audience prompted the name change and article change. But, I still wonder, is it enough to generate traffic from Facebook? Is Facebook really the new "word of mouth"? Is social media proactive enough in relation to PR? I'm curious.