Facebook has a lot of power over people right now. Internally, we’ve been mulling this around for quite some time… “What if Facebook were to start charging brands for Fan pages?”
Well, right now they’re not. But they could. It is their network. But that’s not the hot social media topic right this second.
The big issue with Facebook this week is the upgrade and redesign of how you can interact via Fan pages. There are a lot of pros to this, namely the ability to interact outside of your page, as your page. We’ve been using workarounds for this sort of functionality for a while now, some of which we’re going to keep in place because they’re better, but overall this new interaction is a nice feature. Being able to see who adds your page and when is a cool bit of information to know.
What don’t we like? First, this new functionality also allows brands to spam other brands. Are they? Not on our clients’ pages, but we suspect for some bigger brands, this could happen in the very near future. The major thing we’re seeing out in the Interweb is that a lot of brand managers are disappointed in how posts by Fans are coming through. Instead of coming up in chronological order, you get the below:
As of right now (February 15, 2011), Facebook hasn’t announced plans to change how posts are shown. And they may never do so. This may change the way we interact with people on our Fan pages or perhaps, make social media a little less social.
Similar to how we’re hesitant to use the word “social media expert” , despite the certificates we’ve received and previous work we’ve done, we’re also hesitant to say if these changes will be for better or for worse. Your best option is to play around and see what works for your brand. Experiment.
Social media isn’t truly “free”, but if you have a little time to spare, it is worth experimenting with to see what works for your brand now and ways you can adapt to the landscape in the future.