November 2007

When Facebook announced their pages feature, I poked around for a bit at the new option and quickly compared them in my mind with Facebook Groups. All that led to a post about several questions to ask yourself before deciding if you want to make a Page or a Group for your business.

Realistically, there’s no reason you can’t or shouldn’t make both. And in fact, I just ran across a post on Search Engine Journal that drops a few reasons why you SHOULD make a Facebook page even if a group serves your interests better. Notably:

1. Pages are public. Most of Facebook is behind a login, preventing search engines from indexing. However, some Fan pages are not behind a login and thus search engines can index the page. Hopefully, people will stumble on the result in SERPs, visit the Facebook page, and then get to your site via the link (see reason #2).

2. Pages include links. Because the pages are public, you can get some nice facebook.com link credit. You can’t use an anchor text, but hey, it’s free.

So if you haven’t yet made a Facebook page for your business, you might as well sign up and get yourself listed in the “Facebook Business Directory.” We’ll undoubtedly be talking about the dos and don’ts of Facebook Pages at our upcoming conference in December.

Normally I don’t read Valleywag, even though I know I should. But this is kind of funny:

Kevin Colvin, an intern at Anglo Irish Bank’s North American arm, was busted when he told his manager, Paul Davis, that he’d miss work due to what colleagues took to be a “family emergency”. Davis turned up the photo above, freshly posted to Facebook from the Halloween party Colvin apparently missed work to attend, and attached it to his reply, copying the rest of the office as he did it.

The picture with the e-mail thread is up on the post at Valleywag, and you have to admit, Paul Davis is kind of funny.

But despite the humor in this situation, it brings up one of the main reasons people are afraid of pulling social networks into the workplace, or, for that matter, having anything about you up online at all.

But Facebook is only as “dangerous” as you let it be. There are layers and layers of privacy settings, and if Kevin had wanted, he could have allowed his co-workers to only see his “limited profile,” and he could exclude pictures from the things they could see.

Sure, he’s got to be a little embarrassed right now, but then again, he did wear a dress for Halloween.

There’s an article on CIO.com about how to create a successful Facebook app (which they call a widget). There’s some good advice in there, but there’s also advice that I’m not so sure I buy:

If widget makers on Facebook ever have regrets, it’s that they delayed an hour or two to polish their application before releasing it to the masses. Gone are the days of brooding over pieces of code or taking extra time for testing. Since most widget makers rely on advertising for their revenue (not complicated software licenses that tie up buyers for years), they accept the fact that a widget won’t be perfect on its first release. Instead, they get it out as quickly as possible, hope it catches on and then make adjustments as the user community aggressively leaves messages on feedback loops.

Sure, speed is important, and you might go for this method if you’re running with the shotgun effect (make 30 apps, see which ones work), but I think you’re better off spending that extra hour making sure your user-interface is polished and easy to use and at least reasonably good to look at.

Many apps that have been plastered with ugly ads or had bad layouts have been panned in reviews and dropped by users before they’ve really been given a shot. The process of adding and removing an application on Facebook is essentially frictionless. In other words - it’s really easy for users to jump ship. How do you keep them (or attract users from a similar app?) Simple: have a better user experience.

The number one killer is not “we waited an hour and made our app prettier,” it’s server crashes, which CIO does correctly warn you about. But I don’t need to get into that, because they do: go check it out.

Companies (or bands) who are joining Facebook now and creating Pages are, it seems like, mostly made up of people who have been on Facebook individually already. Which means they’re probably somewhat familiar with some of the rules of the road for marketing yourself on Facebook before there was a real place for your business.

This is a good thing, because just having a page and placing social ads is not and never will be all there is to marketing your business on Facebook.

I hope that the businesses that start joining Facebook now in order to create pages, the businesses that haven’t already been on Facebook, realize that while social ads, beacon, and pages are all great new tools for essentially giving your brand good exposure, they’re still just ads.

If you’re creating a Page for your business and you haven’t spent any time on Facebook yourself, I suggest you do so when you set up your page. Fill out your profile with good information - a bare-bones profile looks like you’re just here to shill your products with a minimum amount of effort. Put in some good interests. Write something in the “about me” section so people can get a snapshot of your personality.

Then go join a few interesting groups. Leave a comment on a wall. Start at least one thread on an open message board. Check back later to see the responses.

If you do this, people will be more inclined to be a “fan” of your page. They’ll want to do it because you’re cool. It’s the same value you get from blogging - you’re putting a face (in this case your own) to the business, and I don’t need to tell you that people are far more inclined to like and support a business if they feel like it’s not a faceless monolith.

If you’re still feeling your way around the internet for social networks, not really sure what to stick your head into or, for that matter, exactly how to do it, you might want to give this guide a read.

One of the reasons I like this guide is that they’re coming at it from the perspective of someone totally new to the space. I know for a fact that when I’m doing a beginner’s guide I tend to leave out some of the details that are important just because they’re so obvious to me that I don’t really notice them. These guys have really done a good job of checking for those omissions:

Though anyone can join, Facebook’s streamlined appearance and its controls on who can contact you have prevented it from morphing into another MySpace free-for-all. The service recently added installable third-party applications, making it a strong competitor to Netvibes, Pageflakes, and other personalized portal sites. These tips and tricks will help you add new dimensions to your profile.

Any online activity involves some risk. The question is: When does the risk outweigh the benefits? Your Facebook profile can say a lot about you, or just a little. In fact, nothing prevents you from creating a completely fictitious persona on Facebook by using an anonymous E-mail account when you register. Such accounts appear to be rare, however, because the value of Facebook lies in its ability to help you connect with people you know.

One of the really cool benefits of having a large audience is that you get to experiment with new things and have participation in ways that you otherwise would not have. Fred Wilson has been doing that with his blog and a Facebook Page for Union Square Ventures, his VC Firm.

Today he posted some stats from his new Facebook ads, and stats from his Facebook page. The conclusion?

what’s interesting to me is that there’s a better way to get fans on your business’ page on Facebook. Get someone with the right audience to link to it. Then it will spread virally through the news feed on Facebook as people join. Here’s our stats for the past couple days since I did that.

It’s worked a lot better for him so far to link to his page on his own blog than to run ads in Facebook. Why? Because if you get a few people to join the group from a blog link, then the activity spreads through the newsfeed and other people will check out the page or the group - virality comes more easily from Facebook’s built-in activity monitor than from their ad systems. But we knew that already.

I wonder how much page fandom on Facebook right now is due to curiosity. A lot of people are creating pages and becoming “fans” of pages just to try it out and see what the deal is. When that stage is done, I wonder how much harder it will be to grow a Facebook page.

Our buddy and conference-partner Nick O’Neill yesterday launched a brand new site called The Social Times, which is covering—you guessed it—pretty much everything in the social media space.

If you’ve been paying any attention recently to Nick’s original blog, Allfacebook, you already know that Nick’s got the know-how and the gumption to really cover the space. They’ve already written about some interesting statistics about social network usage and Friendster’s launch of a Chinese version of their site.

Be sure to add it to your list of places to check out when you’re surfing the social sphere.

Dan Lester wrote a post on Allfacebook this morning about his recent fun fitting OpenSocial apps into Facebook with a Facebook app he calls OpenSocket.

The implications are both obvious and numerous, but it’s well worth noting that one of the reasons this port takes OpenSocial apps into Facebook and not vice-versa is probably because the functions available in OpenSocial are more generic and somewhat less powerful than some of the Facebook-specific functionality available through the Facebook API.

Does this mean you should ignore OpenSocket? Absolutely not.

If you’re planning on engaging with multiple networks, this could be the way to have your cake and eat it to. At least until Facebook starts supporting OpenSocial themselves.

So says the Ad-vocate:

First of all, DON’T create a destination, no one needs another “branded space”.

People don’t need another location where they can download Mountain Dew wallpapers. The approach that is being pitched is basically just an extension of the groups feature with some extra bells and whistles attached, wrapped up in the ‘products’ category.

I tend to agree. Just because there’s now a space on Facebook for companies to set up shop doesn’t mean you should treat it like directory. The whole point of Facebook is to be social and interact with people, so if you’re going to make a page for your company, make sure it’s not a one-way portal.

Provide opportunities for your “fans” to be fans. They’ll appreciate it.

As someone who’s very tech-oriented, I often spend a lot of time marveling at how cool the feature are in something like Facebook. Hey, cool, check out these ads. Hey cool, you can e-mail people from your facebook messaging dashboard.

But it’s good to be reminded every once in a while that there are tons of people on Facebook, and many other social networks, who have really cool experiences with people instead of technology. This is, after all, where the real value of Facebook comes from:

Until this month, I believed there were exactly eight Danzicos: my five other immediate family members, two aunts, and me. No others. When I broke character last month to invite my brother as a friend on Facebook (I figured it was the responsible older-sister thing to do), I found more than eight Danzicos in the search results. And not only were there Danzicos, but “D’Anzicas” too: the original spelling of my last name.

I think that’s kinda neat.

Our very own Jason Preston spent a few hours culling through Facebook to come up with his list of the top 15 groups for online community builders. Our hope is to provide a resource for online community types, marketers, relationship technologists and other Facebook for business types. In short, the target audience for our 2007 Web Community Forum conference. Yes, we’re pandering shamelessly.

You can see the original group list in all its glory here, or you can just enjoy the embedded table after the jump. [click to continue...]

Apparently, according to those with a sneak peak at this week’s ComScore numbers, Facebook has yet to fully recover from the September traffic dip (i.e. get back to August numbers), but MySpace is roaring ahead with record highs in unique visitor counts:

Facebook bounced back from the seasonal downturn in September, showing 7.5% month-over-month growth with 32.9 unique visitors for the month. Meanwhile, MySpace hit a new all-time high with 71.9 million unique visitors in October. While the site also had a seasonal dip in September, unlike Facebook the total was up from August, when the company had a reported 68.4 million uniques.

I need to avoid the trap of calling MySpace out of the fight just because I don’t like it. As much as I might close my eyes and twirl my hands, mine is not the only opinion that matters.

Being the big guy sometimes sucks. It sucks because everyone rips on you all the time. Facebook’s new Social Ads system, at least from my particular vantage point, is being roundly criticized for its a) problems with good targeting data, and b) blatant capitalism.

Ben Kepes at diversity.net adds his voice to the group:

It seems that while every man and his dog is a member of Facebook, in terms of targetted, contextual and relevancy, they’re all one great big homogenous mass. Hardly in context for users (or paying advertisers for that matter).

Good, good. I’m with you so far. Most members of Facebook haven’t listed all or even most of their interests and relevant ad-targeting information. Makes it kind of a weak targeting group.

All the more reason to bet on Google’s OpenSocial as the winning play in this particular war.

What? That doesn’t sound quite right.

Sure, Facebook’s new ad system has a little ways to go, but so did their last ad system. The point here is that they’re innovating, and I’ll be very surprised if a somewhat buggy advertising process kills interest in developing for the Facebook platform.

Facebook recently added the ability for users to search Pages as well as the usual people, groups, and applications. I have always thought that Facebook’s search feature is relatively useless and ineffective, despite the fact that it is largely the only way to find anything.

VentureBeat seems to think this could be the first step towards really taking on Google at its own game:

It raises a new question about Facebook’s ambitions, as it finds itself the David against the Google Goliath. Will it pull out the ultimate slingshot: a full-fledged search engine for the web, not just the Facebook site?

Good Lord I hope not. The Facebook search experience so far is abysmal, and I don’t have much faith in their ability to pull together anything remotely competitive with Google.

Clickety Clack certainly thinks that Page search is a bad move:

Wow, this sounds so useless– a feature that caters to advertisers instead of users. As greedy as I am, one of the things Google taught me was to be cautious about changing focus to serve advertisers instead of the core users.

I’m not sure I agree there. Searching Pages isn’t useless - it’s part of the core idea behind pages: that they can be discovered and aligned with.

What I’d really like to see is Facebook spend time improving it’s internal search experience, which is I think largely a UI issue. Then maybe, maybe we can talk about Facebook searching the web.