Find us on Facebook? If you're lucky

I was recently in a café having morning tea and I noticed a piece of A4 laminated paper attached to the wall. I was sat reasonably close and could see the headline, “Find us on Facebook” but I couldn’t read the rest of the message without disturbing the people who were eating their brunch and sat directly underneath it.

I assume it gave their Facebook page address, but maybe not.

The use of Facebook is now very common by brands big and small, and indeed you will see the Facebook logo on TV shows and commercials, encouraging people to “Find us on Facebook”, but are we going to search for your page in reality?

“Find us on Facebook” is really just the same as saying “find us in the telephone directory” or “find us on the web”, something we wouldn't dream of doing, it makes it too hard for our prospect to find us.

Facebook’s search functionality has never been the best and so it can be almost impossible to find some pages unless you have the time to scroll through the many possibilities. Most people don’t, and much like a Google search, if the page you are searching for is not on the first or second page of the search results, we tend to forget it and move on. As Facebook’ search is limited, you really have to second-guess what the brand has called their page for it to come up in the first place. It’s much too hard.

So the common term of “Find us on Facebook” really is not enough if you want to attract people to your page, never mind encouraging them to “Like” it as well.

Just like your web address, make your Facebook URL easy to spell, easy to pronounce and even more importantly, easy to remember. Then tell your audience just that. Make it easy.

Is your Facebook page name easy for others to remember? Feel free to share yours below.

Linda Coles is the author of “Learn marketing with social media in 7 days” (Wiley) and is an author, speaker and trainer on building relationships. She lives in New Zealand on a fig orchard. You can get a free sample of a chapter of her book by registering for her newsletter.

This post was originally published on my blog.