Facebook Page experiences

Until 2007, companies that had a presence on Facebook used Facebook Groups, to communicate with their “following”. To make a clear distinction between groups that we mostly for fun (like the “I have more foreign policy experience than Sarah Palin Group“) and groups by organizations and companies, Facebook started offering Facebook “Pages”, only available for real life companies or brands.

Facebook Pages offer basically the same functionality as Facebook Groups, with a few added benefits:

It’s possible to message all “fans” (that’s how group members are called);
Extensive statistics for amount of visitors, fans, and much more;
Seamless integration with Facebook Ads (I’ll talk about our experience with Ads in a blog posting coming up soon);
Non-Facebook group members can also see our Facebook Page.
Our Barcelona Spotter Sonia Martinez Arguelo took the initiative by starting the predecessing Spotted by Locals Group. After making the decision to start a Facebook Page, together with Sonia, we shut the Group down in September 2008 and open the Spotted by Locals Facebook Page.

Without much effort, we now have a following of 128 fans. Most of them are total strangers to me in real life; not Spotters or personal friends. We think with a bit more effort, we could do much more to benefit from our Facebook Page. Before we talk about our plans for the future, a list of positive and negative experiences.

The positive experiences:

Setting up a Facebook Page is 5 minutes work.
Facebook offers a great service to transfer you facebook Group members to your new Facebook Page (if you do that, shut down your group immediately);
It’s excellent that you can message all fans instantaneously. E.g. we asked all our fans to vote for us at the Open Web Awards;
A Facebook Page is an excellent way of “viral marketing”. Every time a fan interacts on our Facebook Page, this is mentioned on our fan’s Pagebook feed. Curious Facebook friends will visit our Facebook page, and may sign up as a fan too. One fan can achieve a very big snowball-effect. With 120 million users, the sky is the limit!
The negative experiences:

Many of the “Applications” that work for Facebook Groups and Profiles, don’t work for Facebook Pages. The applications that are available for Facebook Pages don’t offer the the options we’d like to engage our fans;
It would be nice if you could message a selection of your fans;
The URL bothers me. Why not facebook.com/spottedbylocals instead of http://www.facebook.com/pages/Spotted-by-Locals/63018535692?
Our plans for the future
Of course there’s much more to be done than just setting up a page. Our objective is to get a large following of fans, that we keep interested in our cityblogs and our company, by offering them relevant information and updates, the opportunity to discuss things, and some nice goodies.

So far, we haven’t done very well in engaging our fans. There is a lots of room for improvement. Soon, we’ll add a few new functionalities and interesting tools, just for our fans! Stay tuned, and join as as a fan to find out about the new features we’re going to offer!

By: Bart van Poll
http://www.spottedbylocals.com