Facebook profiles are strictly meant for real, live people… try to create one for your business, brand, or product and you will quickly find out how good the Facebook staff are at detecting and disabling profiles that violate this rule. Operating an outlaw Facebook profile is a risk — get caught, and you can lose all of the time and data you pump into the service in one fell swoop.
Facebook Pages are open for business
In order to work with business who want to tap into the social network’s membership base while their rigid standards of conduct, Facebook has created Facebook Pages. A Facebook page is an in for businesses, brands, products, and other such things that do not qualify for a traditional profile. Create a Facebook Page, and members can become “Fans”. Fans can interact with you on your Facebook page in a number of ways:
- Add your page — when a Facebook member becomes a fan of your page, their friends will see it as an update in their news feed.
- Discuss — Fans of your page can leave messages on your wall, and carry on conversations in your discussion forum.
- Pictures — Your Facebook Page comes with a photo gallery - to which fans can upload pictures.
- Reach out — you can send out updates to your fans through your Facebook Page.
The cost? Free (for now).
As of now, Facebook Pages are free of charge. Anyone can create a Facebook page, so long as it doesn’t represent something that is fake… in that case, your page, and possibly your profile may be disabled or deleted by the staff.
How to play ball
Once your Facebook Page is set up, you will need to formulate a good strategy for connecting with your fans. Here is the best advice I can offer: consider yourself a guest in someone else’s house. Facebook started out as a private online community for college students, and later expanded to allow high school students and others into their network. The Facebook staff has cultivated a very neat, clean, organized social network — hence their strict rules regarding who is allowed to have a profile.
Doing business in the digital age requires an entirely new set of rules. Ignore this, and you will incur the wrath of the community… you’ll be regarded as an unwelcome outsider. Need proof? Read about the backlash that occurred when Walmart tried to get into the Web 2.0 scene.
3 responses
July 7th, 2008
Quikboy says:
I’m still kinda miffed that Facebook discontinued networks for high schools and location regions.
It was very easy to find people based on those networks. Kinda makes the whole social “networking” feature, not so much on Facebook anymore.
July 7th, 2008
Douglas Lampi says:
Creating a Fan Page on Facebook and adding the RSS feed from your blog provides a way to send notifications to people within Facebook from an external source.
Pretty handy once you daisy-chain RSS feeds - update one place and several communities get notified.
Doug
July 7th, 2008
Of Zen and Computing says:
Quickboy: Did I miss that? I noticed that the names of my networks, including my college network, are no longer hyperlinked.
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