Facebook Business Page and Upcoming Changes

Do You "Like" Us?:

Social Media giant Facebook has made a pretty significant change to their Business Pages (again!). For those who aren't familiar: on Facebook you have a personal profile where you connect with friends, and you SHOULD also have a Facebook business page that promotes your practice/business. You can then promote your Business page to others and use it to announce updates and news, promote content, and just add another way for past clients, associates, and future clients to connect with your business.

For those who already have Facebook Business Pages, the people who follow your Business Page are called fans. Or at least they used to be.

From now on the people who follow your Facebook Business Page are no longer considered "fans". They simply "like" your business (page). Also, with the new change, if someone other than an admin views your business page, they will only see how many people "like" your business (page), what friends of theirs also like the page, and six random people who also like the page. No longer will everyone who views your Business Page have access to your Facebook "fans", "likers", or whatever Facebook is calling them. This is good for privacy purposes, as competitors no longer have access to fans of other businesses.

One issue that arises with this change is: how many corporations, law firms, small businesses, etc. have to change their television, newspaper, and magazine ads, as well as their business cards and anywhere else promoting their Facebook Business page from "Friend us on Facebook" to "Like us on Facebook" simply because Facebook wanted to change the verbiage? Pretty silly in our opinion but, as always, we'll stay on top of it and let all of our clients know about these changes as they arise.

Facebook Planning on Taking Over our Lives:

Facebook also announced that they will be integrating community pages where they will suggest pages similar to wikis in which you can get more information on a particular topic (they used cooking in their example, but who knows how broad these pages will end up or if any of these pages will be geo-based), connect with other "likers" of that topic, etc.

While Facebook makes it sound like this is just a new feature to enhance users' experiences, it seems more like just another way for them to add more pages to their site where they can sell more advertisements. Based on some of the comments, users are also upset about being added to networks simply because they have those "keywords" mentioned in their profiles, and questions are arising as to who decides if a topic (band, television show, etc.) deserves a community page or not?

This may be a good thing for attorneys currently running Facebook ads if there will be community pages created based on certain topics relevant to your practice (whether they be location-based community pages or pages relevant to your practice area), so stay tuned as we monitor what types of community pages are indeed launched and how they may benefit you.