Facebook Community Pages
Posted by Monica Tailor, 30 June 2010
Facebook recently announced the addition of Facebook community pages. You can read Facebook's blog post about them here.
Pages about communities and interests make a lot of sense to me. The example in the blog post illustrates the idea really well, a community page about cooking is a topic that would be unlikely to appear on Facebook but there are plenty of people who would be interested in the 'cooking' community page.
The problem I've started seeing is that Facebook has also created community pages for brands that are mentioned as an 'interest' in people pages. Which means we see duplicate pages in the search results for some brands and there is little differentiation between the pages, one being the 'official' brand page and the second the community page. Will Facebook users be discerning enough to know which is which?
At the moment most community pages I've looked at are Wikipedia entries alongside Facebook status updates however this will change over time as Facebook start to ask people to add their own content. Nothing surprising in that.
It's understandable that brand managers who have been nurturing their company/brand page are concerned about community pages. They are seeing fragmentation of their fans with some people signing up to the community page, they have no way to contribute to the page and the community page is often ranking above their own page in Facebook search.
If you look after a brand page on Facebook and now have a community page too what can you do?
- Keep close attention to your Wikipedia page/entry as this is forming the basis of the pages
- Reach out to those who have 'liked' your community page and not your page/group. They might have been looking for your page in the first place.
- Sign up to your community page so you can see what people are saying
- Volunteer to look after your community page. Although no one can edit the pages yet Facebook will be asking people to get involved at some point.
Analysts are starting to turn their attention to community pages so the following articles are worth reading if you want to find out more:
What's your take on Facebook community pages? Leave your comments below.
- Tags Marketing, Social Media
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You've articulated really well my own discomfort with these 'community pages'.
Another potential for diffusion of a brand's presence on Facebook are the new social plugins. In theory they're great; they allow website owners to add a Like button to pages of their site. Once somebody has Liked you via this method you can publish status updates to their stream, just as you would if they had Liked your FB page.
However, they're not actually connected to any content on FB, and if they click on your link from a status update, they'll be redirected to your website instead of your brand's page.
One of the main reasons of getting people to connect with you on Facebook is to provide an opportunity for richer dialogue with them, so I'm approaching these new Like buttons with caution. Great for individual posts and articles, and real-world objects such as books, CDs etc. Not such a good way to get customers to Like brands.
I'd be interested to know how other people are implementing these new social plugins.