Does my Business Need 2 Facebook Pages?

JMR

Due to the nature of the product we sell, we operate both a .ie and a .co.uk website.
We store the products both in Ireland and the UK from where we can ship on a next day basis.
Customer care is handled by an Irish call centre but we use an Irish number on the .ie site and a UK number on the .co.uk site.

Question is should we also have 2 Facebook pages, 2 Twitter accounts etc?
FB page is currently called DryPro UK & Ireland but the address, phone number etc are the Irish ones and I often find myself writing posts that try to direct Irish customers to the .ie site but if you're in the UK you should go to this .co.uk site.

Any opinions?

jimmii

Would make of clearer having a separate place to target UK customers and Irish customers especially if you want to run an offer for just one customer base.

PaulPinnacle

The short answer is that you can target Facebook posts by geolocation, so post one status update for your audience in Ireland and another (different) one for your audience in the UK.

The longer answer, which is the correct one, is that you really need to go back to the basics and figure out what your strategy is for handling all of this. What is the goal of your social media activity? Is it being used for marketing reasons, customer service, something else or a combination of all of these? Whatever the answer is, would your users (not you) gain more by having a single focused channel (or at least 'single per platform') or by having multiple distributed but more focused points of contact?

There's pros and cons to whatever way you do it, just as there is in having a separate .ie and .co.uk domain. There's no clear right or wrong answer, as it really does come down to the specifics of what you're trying to achieve on a platform (i.e. if you're trying to build a community among users it makes sense to merge the activity and solve the issues of different domains by using dev tools on the site itself) and the resources you have available to execute your strategy.

The one common thing you do need though, regardless of how it's implemented, is a clear strategy with quantifiable goals. If you start from there, you'll have a far easier time figuring out an answer to a question like "Should we have one social account or two".

delahuntv

Yes - social media is exactly that - social. Hence you would sometimes give commentary on events of the day or something local to that market.

I have several retail stores and a facebook page for each one - local staff add local interest and I add product / offers. If doing a post about a product, i simply copy and paste into al the apges - so the extra work is minimal.

Your product seems to be aimed to a consumer - so plenty of interaction possible especially with mini heatwaves, 20 mile tailbacks into Southend etc etc.

In Ireland, you can report difference between the 20 mile tailback in UK on the 2km tailback to Brittas bay etc.

bolopapa

It better to have to seperate ones and Include the region names in the name also.
Simple because people don't really read instruction that much, they click and find out it not for IR, they don't go back. When it happen 2 or more times you lossing customers.

mneylon

Running multiple social media profiles if you're a small business doesn't scale very well.

As for the correct site - use GeoIP - most of your problems are solved