Fans of Shakespeare may remember that in A Misummer Night’s Dream, a troupe of actors perform a play for the main characters in the play, hence the phrase, “a play within a play.”

I’d like to offer “a play within a play” and a research case study on one component of a company’s corporate social media strategy: a Facebook Page. 

The "play within a play" is the story of Handshake 2.0’s Facebook Page unfolding within the context of outsourcing its creation to a third party social media provider - Handshake Media, Handshake 2.0’s own parent company.

First, the setting. Handshake Media's CTO launched Handshake 2.0’s Facebook fan page in June, 2009, and we set up the content to be automatically generated including our Twitter feed and our site’s content feed.  The resultant page resembled lines of inscrutable code with post titles, Twitter tweets, URLs and no updates made personally and no photos or images.  Interaction regarding that content was taking place at the source - replies and retweets on Twitter, comments on the blog - so we had no comments or updates from our few Facebook fans.  But, by gosh, we had a corporate Facebook page and we could link to it from our site’s home page!

Our thinking evolved, as did Facebook’s features, and we revised our strategy in the third quarter of the year by asking the question we should have asked before launching the page in the first place:  What do we want to have happen as a result of our corporate Facebook page?

Answers can range from building brand awareness to building customer relationships, but for us, Facebook fits beautifully with our vision:  People do business with people they know.  Online, “It’s still who you know.” Our Facebook page could be one more “handshake way” of helping our clients and site users get known. 

The Twitter and blog feeds are gone. I now post updates to our Facebook page myself by hand.  I do my best to post content that showcases “who to know” and invites interaction among all who might do business together.

According to Google Analytics, comparing the traffic sources from the last two quarters of the year, 7/31/09 - 9/30/09 to 10/1/09 - 12/31/10, traffic to Handshake 2.0 from Facebook increased by 25%.  For the full year, from 1/1/09 to 12/30/09, traffic to the site from Facebook more than doubled.

For this case study of one, our conclusion is "The play's the thing." Or the story's the thing.  While we entered the Facebook show sort of haphazardly as one of a crowd of groupies, once we paused and thought about what we were doing and why, we realized a corporate Facebook presence is more like a play within a play where actors and audience switch roles until which is which hardly matters. They mutually create the story of people and companies and how they work and play together.

Handshake 2.0

Promote Your Page Too

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For more ideas about corporate, business and enterprise Facebook pages, feel free to view our category for Social Media.

These two posts read together may prove of value:

The Story of a Corporate Facebook Page
Outsourcing a Coporate Facebook Page