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Facebook
May 18, 2009
It seems like Funeral Directors are going “Facebook Crazy” – every day I am receiving friend
requests from Funeral Directors and seeing Funeral Homes creating profiles, pages, and groups.
The problem is that I see a ton of mistakes being made – most inadvertently because there is not
a lot of direction and guidance available on HOW to use Facebook properly for the Funeral
Industry.
There is no Best Practices for Funeral Homes and Facebook (not yet anyway) but I have been
really digging deep into what IS the best way for funeral directors to harness the power of
Facebook from a Relationship & Loyalty Building (Marketing) strategy without crossing the line
of doing business in a social community.
You have heard me say it before – and this won’t be the last time – the funeral industry is a
“relationship business” where people serve people and buildings, cars, and merchandise are
secondary. When my Great-Grandfather started the undertaking business, and my Grandfather
took it over – they built it on building relationships within their community. They did this by
being involved in various networks of the day – Church, Lodge, Rotary, Town Council, etc.
Fast forward 75 years and networks within communities are still very important – they may be
the same networks as they used to be or may be different ones.
Even though Facebook is a virtual community, it is growing faster than any other network of
people in your community. Let’s take a look at some of the numbers (Source
CheckFacebook.com as of May 18, 2009 – pretty current eh!):
Global Audience: 192,406,840
One last thing before I get into the 7 Mistakes Funeral Directors make with Facebook is that
there are more females on Facebook than men:
We know women make more buying decisions than men and we have also been told that women
regard relationships as very important (hopefully us guys have figured that out by now).
I hope that this gets you going on the right track with your Facebook experience. I have received
a lot of feedback from my Newsletter subscribers about their thoughts regarding Facebook which
I will go into a little deeper later this week – stay tuned!
…Hepp
PS: What are your thoughts on Facebook and the Funeral Industry? Have you had any successes
(or secure any calls) as a result of Facebook? Please share your thoughts below…