Getting Started with Facebook – Part 2 – The New Facebook Pages

Starting today, March 11, fans of organizations with Facebook pages will interact with their favorite orgs, companies and brands the way they interact with their buddies.  On March 11, all Facebook pages will have status updates, walls, and links, just like personal pages.

What does this mean? Well…

• Fans will interact with organizations the same way they interact with their friends. Updates from the org/company pages will be added to fans’ home pages.  Fans can view and comment on status updates, they will get notified when other people join a conversations, and they can view photo, videos and links.
• Organizations will be challenged to do more with their Facebook pages. The change to the new format is good and bad.  Good because companies can do more and have more engagement with their fans.  Bad because their Facebook pages will need more oversight and content.

The Matrix Group Facebook page was previously fairly static.  We posted events and pulled in news, blog posts and photos via RSS.  We didn’t want to overuse the “Send an Update to Fans” button too much, so we used the page to have a presence.  But now, our Facebook page just got a whole lot more dynamic.  We uploaded photos with captions, we’re posting status updates, and soon we’re going to post videos.  Just think, when we updated the Matrix Group status to say “congratulates International Assoc of Chiefs of Police for winning Best In Class for Discover Policing from the IMA. http://www.discoverpolicing.org/,” all of our fans’ home pages or status update pages got that post.  Pretty cool and I hope someone will comment on the site or the award.  So now we’ll use Facebook to create more of a dialogue, promote projects, share information about technology we’re playing with, give candidates a sense of what it’s like to work for us.

Here are some other Facebook pages that are now taking full advantage of the new Facebook page format.

• Stanford University has a great page.  Love the videos and all the comments.
• The National Park Foundation is using it fabulous collection of images to good use and even soliciting donations online.

My top tips for managing your new Facebook page:

• Post a status update, link, photo or video at least 2-3 times per week.  This will get your fans accustomed to hearing from you.
• Experiment with topics and messages to see what elicits comments and feedback from your fans.
• Make several people in your organization an admin on your Facebook account so that there is always someone tending the page.  (Select Edit page, then manage admins in the lower right of the page.)
• Have a content strategy so you are clear on the type and tone of updates, links, photos and videos you will use to populate the site.

Advertising Age says this change makes Facebook more like MySpace and Twitter and wonders “can brands be trusted to respect social (network) etiquette?”

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• Tags: Facebook, marketing, social networking