User generated content can be great if it is guided in the right direction. Businesses can allow their customers to advertise for them, for free. If properly managed, UGC can increase brand loyalty/recognition, awareness of new products/events and ultimately profits. On the other hand, when it is allowed to get out of control it can destroy everything.
When businesses don’t gui
de the conversation on their page they will sometimes find themselves overrun with irrelevant UGC turning their page in to a huge mess. A certain John Deere branch in Switzerland had this exact problem with their Facebook fan page. They never made it clear that they were a specific branch in Switzerland. Thousands of users joined and posted content, virtually all of them from the U.S. The users seemed to be under the impression that they were on the page for the main corporation. While this misunderstanding increased the traffic to the page, it didn’t benefit the Switzerland location in any way. Any UGC that may have been relevant to the Switzerland branch got lost in the sea of posts from the U.S., making the page completely ineffective.
Another problem with this fan page is that when you first get to it everything is blank. You get directed to the wall with a filter set to show only content by John Deere. The problem is this business didn’t post anything so all that is there is a recent activity statement saying that John Deere joined Facebook. You have to set the filter to “John Deere + Fans” to see all the comments by Americans saying how much they love their big tractor. John Deere should really consider creating a fan page so that the 137,800 fans of the Switzerland branch’s page have somewhere to go. Otherwise these loyal followers will get the impression that John Deere has no interest in them while continuing to spam John Deere Switzerland’s page.
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