Facebook crossed 500 million users this year. It is now the largest standing audience any brand has ever had access to outside television — and unlike television, it talks back. The question for corporate communications is no longer whether to be on Facebook. It is how to run it without embarrassing the company.
Pages, Not Profiles
A business belongs on a Page. Personal profiles for brands violate Facebook's terms of service and can be pulled down without warning. Pages give a brand the Like button, Insights data, custom tabs, and the ability to run ads against the audience. Every corporate Facebook presence should start there.
The Like button — released sitewide in April after F8 — is the single most important Facebook development of the year for marketers. It puts a Facebook endorsement on any page of the brand's own website and pulls those endorsements into the news feeds of the user's friends. Implement it across product pages, press releases, and the newsroom.
Open Graph and What It Means
Open Graph, announced at F8 in April, lets Facebook treat any web page as an object inside its social graph. A movie page on a studio site, a product page on a retailer site, a story on a media site — all become connectable. For PR teams, this means the press release and the newsroom are now Facebook surfaces whether the company set them up that way or not. Tag them properly with Open Graph meta tags or Facebook will guess, and Facebook will guess wrong.
Who Is Running Facebook PR
Facebook keeps most of its corporate communications in-house. Brandee Barker led communications for years before stepping out earlier this year. The company has historically worked with Outcast Communications on product PR out of the Bay Area and brings in outside policy and crisis counsel as needed. The in-house function reports up through Sheryl Sandberg as Chief Operating Officer, with Mark Zuckerberg as the face of the company on the biggest stories. Elliot Schrage runs global communications and public policy.
That structure tells you something useful. Facebook itself runs lean and keeps strategic work close. A brand operating on the platform should do the same — keep the voice in-house, use agencies for campaigns and surge work, and never let the Facebook Page become an orphan owned by an intern.
The Daily Discipline
Post on a rhythm. Once a day is a reasonable floor for most consumer brands. Twice for media and entertainment. Less than three times a week and the page reads as abandoned.
Reply in public. Customer-service questions land on the wall. Answer them on the wall. Deleting a critical comment is the fastest way to turn one complaint into a hundred.
Use photos and video. Facebook's news feed surfaces image and video posts at a much higher rate than plain text. The native upload — not a YouTube link — gets the better reach.
Run the ads. Organic reach on a Page is real but uneven. Paid Facebook ads are still cheap on a CPM basis compared to almost any other digital channel. Budget for them.
Measure with Insights. Fan growth, post views, interactions per post. These are the numbers to put in front of the CMO. Vanity fan counts alone are not a strategy.
Crisis Posture
Three things go wrong on Facebook. A customer-service complaint snowballs in the comments. A campaign tone-deafs into a brand backlash — Nestlé learned this earlier in the year when its Page was overrun by Greenpeace activists over palm oil sourcing. Or the brand itself becomes a story and the Page becomes the venue. The playbook is the same in all three: acknowledge fast, respond on the same surface where the problem is happening, link out to the canonical correction on the company's own newsroom, and do not delete comments unless they violate platform rules.
Old Spice ran the other playbook this summer. Wieden+Kennedy and the in-house team responded to fans on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook in near-real time with custom videos. The campaign sold soap and reset what "social media response" means for a Fortune 500 brand. Most companies cannot run that play. All of them should study it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should a corporate brand have a Facebook Page in 2010? Yes. Five hundred million users is not a niche audience. The cost of a clean Page is staff time. The cost of not having one is letting unofficial pages, fan pages, and complaint pages fill the vacuum.
How often should we post? Daily for consumer brands. Three to five times a week is a working minimum for B2B and corporate. Frequency without substance does more harm than silence.
What about negative comments? Answer them. Delete only spam, threats, or material that violates Facebook's terms. Deleting legitimate criticism is a story.
Do we need an agency? For campaigns and creative, yes. For day-to-day Page management, the strongest results come from an in-house community manager who knows the brand cold.
How do we measure ROI? Tie Facebook activity to traffic on the company's own site, to coupon redemptions, to event sign-ups, to leads. Fan count is an input, not a result.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
