I have been asked recently by a couple of clients about the wisdom of creating multiple pages for their organisation to reflect the need of the different client groups.

I would be interested to hear from others in the group about this issue? Is it always best to stick to one main Facebook page that covers the different consumer groups, or is it better to create multiple Pages which talk directly to each type of audience?

The danger of having multiple accounts in my view is that the Facebook presence may become too fragmented. This issue must be quite common with multi-nationals and I would be very interested to hear what others think.

Alan

I agree with @dcoville001.  The decision about making multiple pages really depends on the type of business you have and how big your business is.  A lot of the larger corporations have multiple pages to allow the user to connect with a “sub-brand”.

In addition, many authors will create a main page about them, but have a second page which highlights their latest book.

While determining whether to create multiple pages, the company needs to realize that they will also have to monitor and run those pages.  They need to make sure they are staffed well enough to give each page their undivided attention.

Thanks everyone, some great advice. I like the idea for large companies of keeping the parent brand.  @joancrocker I was very interested in your idea of multiple landing pages (a solution that occurred to me too) but I can’t see how you can determine which of your welcome pages people see when they visit your Page, so if you have figured this out I would love to hear from you.

As far as I am aware, you set the landing page and all Facebook traffic will go there. How could you go about (for example) directing traffic from the US to one landing page and traffic from Germany to another one? My client has a network of international distributers and wants to be able to direct traffic to these country-specific distributers.

Any ideas on this would be fantastic!

Thanks for you help  @joancrocker much appreciated! I have been speaking to my client again today and I think they are going to opt for a single welcome tab which lists the territory contacts. At the moment the ads are only planned for the USA and UK so there are only two contacts that will be needed.

If we decide to run adverts for the german market as well, I think we will need to revert to plan A and have separate landing pages for each country. The difficulty there will be having multiple tabs all called ‘Welcome’ (unless I can figure out a way to customise the app name as it appears on the wall).

@chatmarketing I know I made two pages. One for my company and one for my brand. @dcoville001 Is right in my case. Yes, it is more work and will cost money if you have to hire someone, but there’s a reason a lot of companies have pages and their products have their own page. For example. Rovio Mobile has their page, AND the Angry Birds page. Also if you have more than one brand like they do you wouldn’t put a racing game on the angry birds page. I hope this makes sense. Thanks and good luck!

Thanks for the great advice everyone – I am learning so much with this forum!  @andrea-vahl do you know if it is it possible to rename the welcome tabs so you could have for example ‘Welcome USA’ or ‘Welcome UK? That way it would be very easy to know which ‘welcome’ page you are directing specific ads to. I assume you can test the link on the ad at the Preview stage, so even if you can’t customise the name of the tabs, by trial and error you will link to the correct one.

Karen, @projsocial I watched that webinar too with Guy Kawasaki when he was saying that he wished he had never started another Facebook page for his new book, for exactly the same reason as you mention in your post.

I do however agree with @dcoville001 that in the case of a very large brand that serves different territories, then it is possible to have multiple pages but branded with the parent company too. These companies would have the resources to maintain separate pages locally. 

I had a client recently that was a university and they are maintaining several pages, one for alumni, one for current students, international students etc but they were finding it very difficult to co-ordinate, so in this case they would probably have been better sticking to the one page.

Thanks again everyone for your comments!