I’ve been thinking about this blog post in one form or another for about 8 months. I kept stewing about how I was going to word it and what my argument would be. In the end, I’ll just come out and say it: Facebook is wrong about Fan pages.
For those of you that don’t know the intricacies of Facebook (and there are many), the difference between “Friending” someone on Facebook and becoming a “Fan” is that one requires a reciprocal connection and the other does not.
Facebook’s TOS mandate that anyone other than a person with a real first name and last name use a Fan page instead of a regular account. For example, if Bob Jones owns the Quick Fix Auto Repair Shop, Bob can have a Facebook page that connects via “Friending” whereas the Auto Shop would require Bob to create a “Fan” page. Follow me?
I believe this model is wrong on a few different levels. First off, it goes against everything that social media is supposed to be: community, conversation and interaction. It is supposed to level the playing field of big media and talk with us, not at us – or down to us. Becoming a “Fan” continues down the big media path. There is no option for a reciprocal connection and therefore perpetuates the one-sided communication model that we’ve been trying to get away from.
Recently I dug up some data on Facebook Fan pages and the results seem to validate my points.
Did you know that 77% of all Fan pages have less than 1,000 fans according to Sysomos, a social media monitoring firm? They analyzed 600,000 Fan pages on Facebook and came up with the following distribution curve.
The vast majority of pages have between 10 and 1,000 Fans. In fact, only 4% have more than 10,000 fans and less then 1/20th of one percent have more than a million Fans. I would bet that most people have more “Friends” on their personal accounts, than they do “Fans.”
Why are so many Fan pages unsuccessful at attracting people? I have a theory.
We get bombarded with requests to become Fans of everything under the sun. On an average day, I get 15 to 20 requests from people wanting me to become a Fan of everything from Puppet Motorcycle Racing to the Cat Fancy Club of Southwestern Utah. Each day I go through the list clicking “ignore” and then, guess what? Two days later I get the same requests from the same Fan pages over and over. It’s incredibly annoying.
Even if I did accept some of these, like I accept Facebook Friend requests, a Friend request shows as a tally of who you’re connected to and it is a reciprocal relationship – I show up on their wall and they show up on mine. By comparison, acceptance of a Fan request means you get some obnoxious list in your “info” tab of all the random people, companies, restaurants and celebrities you’re a fan of. To me, becoming a Facebook Friend is about accepting a connection. Becoming a Fan is like becoming a collectable object. You’re just a number, a statistic in the Sysomos research.
In fact, according to Sysomos, Fan pages on Facebook tend to be updated, on average, only once every 16 days. How much of a conversation are you having if you only particpate once every 16 days? Twitter on the other hand is about regular and constant dialogue. You follow someone on Twitter because you actually want to engage with them. Why do you Fan someone on Facebook? I still can’t answer that question.
I plead with Facebook. First, stop forcing companies to use a Fan page. Rockstars have “Fans.” Companies like Quick Fix Auto Repair Shop have “customers.” It is condescending to those customers to assume we don’t want to have a connected, reciprocal relationship with them. Second, raise the limit on the number of Friends an account can have. Lifting the arbitrary 5,000 Friend limit would allow companies to use the Friend model as opposed to the Fan model. This would allow us to create the type of social experience and interaction we want to have with our customers, as opposed to Facebook dictating it to us.
Earlier today we published our picks for the 
As you have already heard… last week MasterCard suspended all direct marketing merchant accounts. They are cracking down and enforcing new regulations and guidelines pertaining to direct marketing. MasterCard maintains that these guidelines must be complied with in order for them to continue processing payments. ALL non-compliant accounts have been suspended until they can show 100% compliance with these new guidelines.
