Photo by Sarah Altamimi.
Corissa St. Laurent works for an email marketing company and has her own Facebook page to promote training events and ask her fans what they think about the evolution of social media.
Christine Green offers web designing services to small business owners. She is self-employed and uses Facebook to share industry articles.
Julia Campbell talks about the importance of social media marketing for nonprofits on her Facebook page.
EJ Smooth plays saxophone and his Facebook page promotes his gigs.
The list goes on and on. I have many friends who are sole proprietors, entrepreneurs, authors, musicians, and other personal brands who are creating and promoting Facebook pages. I can relate. I’ve been in their shoes. I’ve also created Facebook pages for my blog and self-employment.
No more.
Tamar Weinberg encourages individuals who are not large companies to install the Follow button and ask their otherwise fans to follow their profiles instead. Citing her 9,500+ followers, Tamar elaborates:
Hey Facebook friends, instead of creating fan pages for yourself and inviting your friends to Like you, just turn on subscriptions. If you were wondering where my fan page went, they’re now my
subscribersfollowers. It would be prudent to do the same, especially as maintaining two presences of your own is likely to be a pain.
Within a day after reading her argument and participating in the ensuing Facebook comments — and subsequent tweeting with Geoff Livingston, Phil Gerbyshak, and Tamar — I deleted my business page but not before suggesting then-fans followers to me instead. (My city councilor page remains as public officials should be the only individuals with pages, really.)
How it works is anyone who follows me will read whatever content I share with the public. Keeping in mind how I use friend lists, if I don’t want my followers to read certain content such as photos of my nephew then I restrict that Facebook audience to family and explicit friend lists.
Please keep in mind why someone clicks the Like button on your page. Loyalty is hardly why. The Chief Marketing Officer Council opines:
Although consumers respond favorably about their likelihood to purchase from a brand they follow on Facebook, that’s not overly evident from their Facebook timelines. Marketers should keep in mind that for consumers, Facebook remains primarily a place to interact with peers and share experiences. Although many consumers have opened up to brands that are present on Facebook, brand marketers should not expect they’ve earned consumer loyalty simply because a consumer has clicked the “like” button.
I understand the desire for individuals with books or gigs or events or other materials to promote to have Facebook pages for people to like, comment, and share; but that liking, commenting, and sharing can equally occur on the profile.
By allowing your fans to follow you, you’re increasing your Facebook productivity by allowing yourself to write updates to friends and followers in one place. Use friend lists, too, and you’ll never experience a problem with who sees what when.
Visit my profile now and click the Follow button.
Any questions?
About Ari Herzog
Good stuff
I have to say I agree.
(oh, and FIRST.)
I can’t add much here, Ari, as you’ve said it all. LOL
Thanks for the inspiration, Tamar, something I’d been going back and forth on for a while.
Great article and have been using my profile more and more ever since default landing page went away. What are you thoughts on being profile heavy when certain activity is facebook illegal such as Real estate listings and products? Thanks.
If you are posting illegal content on Facebook, that’s your problem and you risk being shut down. Whether you have a profile or page is irrelevant there Peter.
I did not explain myself clearly, sorry. I do not post illegally, ever. My point was that if we delete our Page as the article suggests and only use our profiles we therefore have no outlet for direct business activity. Your thoughts.
I am not suggesting an ultimatum. I am merely suggesting. Only you know what you’re putting out on your page and how your fans are responding.
While this resolves the issue of business contacts seeing personal posts, I feel I would still be left with friends and family blocking my updates because they are not interested in seeing my business updates.
I will have to think about this though, because my Facebook pages seem a waste of effort to me most of the time.
Your friends who don’t want to read X from you have the ability to tell FB not to show you that X, while still seeing whatever else they want. There is so much customization in FB’s privacy settings. I suppose I should create a followup post on how to do this?
I think the only problem with this is for the people who don’t want to inundate their family and friends with their business updates. I know of several people I was friends with on Facebook that unfriended me because most of what I was posting was links to blog posts that they probably had no interest in.
And unfortunately (as far as I know of at least), with the subscription option, you have to post anything you want your subscribers to see as public – you can’t limit out your close friends and family that just might not be interested.
Hence, I like having both – subscribers on my profile and a page. People who just want my blog post updates can bypass my Instagram posts, and people who want a mix can subscribe on my profile.
Facebook is partially to blame here — for allowing you to add friendships and subscriptions but not providing easy answers how to hide people from your news feed and/or to specify what you want to really see. For instance, if Sally frequently posts photos to her wall and I don’t want to see those photos, I can instruct Facebook’s algorithm to not show me Sally’s shared photos. But FB doesn’t make it easy to learn how to do that.
I see where you are coming from, Ari, and I like the principle. But I share Kristi’s concern as well. I used to post more business-related stuff on my profile (before I started a business page), and I had friends telling me I needed a life. I’m going to have to seriously give this some thought, though, especially for my fiction-writing. Not sure my Warlock Case Files page is serving much purpose.
And yet you tweet from one account, not multiple accounts. How are the two platforms different?
I tweet little to no personal stuff. While on Facebook, I discuss my dog, my kid, what I had to eat, etc. I don’t do any of that on Twitter, and my Facebook friends seem to prefer me keeping most of my feed personal, based on the number of Likes and comments that I get on the various types of posts.
It would be nice if there was an option to share posts just with subscribers or to share it publicly minus a specific friend’s list. While people like us know how to tell Facebook to only show us specific types of updates, the regular users don’t and most seem to just unfriend if they don’t like a few things.
Ari nice post!
I’m new in social media “still learning” and I want to say this article really help me a lot. It is a big advantage when you listen to community before push yourself in promoting your product or company.
Hi Ari,
When looking at the Info-Graphic it easy to see the behaviour of users on Facebook – And when thinking honestly of one’s own behaviour when it comes to sharing and liking content this absolutely correlates.
Personally – I think a “Dislike” button would thought the whole social media marketing community on their heads – though it would be a great social recommendation signals for those who trust peer to peer recommendations.
Facebook now requires users to pay in order for their fans to be able to see their updates. Why, because its become a public company now. Big whoop!
In light of this terrible move by Facebook, I would tend to agree with this article. I mean what use is my Facebook page to me if Facebook restricts it so that only 10% of my fans can see my updates?! Why should I pay FB for a service that was and still should be free?
Facebook is not requiring you to pay for anything, Leo. That first paragraph is an urban legend.
True that you don’t *have* to pay, but also true that edgerank will render your posts almost completely invisible unless you are able to get daily engagement. For pages that don’t post much or don’t get engagement, a downward spiral is inevitable.
Oh yes it is:
http://www.techfruit.com/2012/06/13/facebook-forcing-bands-and-creators-to-pay-to-reach-their-fans/
https://www.facebook.com/write4recovery/posts/344797228925766
“Facebook Forcing Bands And Creators To Pay To Reach Their Own Subscribed Fans”!
There are two issues at play, Leo:
First, Facebook Page owners can opt to pay for “promoted posts” which is essentially an ad to spark its fans to interact.
Second, Facebook Users can opt to “highlight” their own status updates, also ads to spark their friends to interact.
But nothing is required.
Started Facebook Fan Page few months back & had some success with it.But with option for enabling privacy with Facebook Subscribe Option I feel the need to shift to it but I fear the chances of loosing some of my fans on FB Page.
I feel FB should build some thing automated for converting.I read they are in the process of doing it, but no updates upto now.
I’m running my Fb fanpage for my blog and i’m getting good traffic from my fans.
Great analysis, Ari.
I’m still undecided if Facebook Pages works for me. Most of my Page followers are friends anyhow, I only have a few random fans following me through the Page. Anything I post on the Page also gets posted to my timeline, as I have friends who don’t follow the Page. But if you are a friend, AND you follow my page, you get the same thing twice (although I’ll sometimes try and vary the message a bit). That can be a turnoff for some people.
The “Subscribe” button is a great option and feature, but most people don’t understand what it means or how it works. And on top of that, I would then have to decide which filter to use before posting anything. Having to make that decision every day would really discourage me from posting anything. So, I’m not real sure how I will move forward yet.
I can see the value in doing this, however, I run two distinctly different businesses using fan pages as part of each. How would I be able to keep them separate and distinct without being able to specifically segment my subscribers?
Still, I will give it some thought.
I’ve been doing that too. Shut down my Walden Recruiting site, turned on Subscribe, and doing lots of public posts focused on thought leadership.
I’ve also been buffering posts on to my social media to my the reposts on my Facebook page rather than the original to drive more visitors to my Facebook profile to subscribe as well.
Good idea?
always use facebook pages in good manner , peoples hate some facebook pages because some pages use auto bots and do auto reply and some other things
Hmm. I’ve been a fanpage holdout for a while, since as 2) a solo PR I’d be one of those w/ only a handful of fans and mostly friends ‘liking’ and 1) I wanted to keep FB as a ‘personal’ space, (naively?) thinking I could. Now I’m seeing I may want to be more active, ‘professionally’ there. So my question, how to use the lists everywhere?
I see the options for when I post a status update, public or friends or limit visibility to a list, but I don’t see it when I go to comment on other pages, walls, threads? Like the status updates, I don’t want every ‘cute picture’ comment on family photos being part of the subscription, or like Tammi I don’t want every ‘interesting post’ comment going to F&F. Is that an option? Thanks.
Some good points Ari, I can see why you would do this, but what about people who want to keep their info to themselves and their friends, whilst using their page to represent their venture. For example, Technology Bloggers is a community blog, and more than one person might want to update our status, you can’t do this with a profile, there is no multi user functionality. Also, I am not the blog, neither is Jonny, Ron, Alan etc. we have tens of writers, so do you need to subscribe to them all?
Your thoughts.
Nice thinking, Ari — but I still have one concern.
Facebook is notorious for changing the rules on a whim. And if you do indeed have some parts of your business/personal split that need to be sharply firewalled, then keeping them as separate entities is the safer thing. I can think of people in the financial services industry, for instance, or company officers.
Your mileage may vary — but it’s a worthwhile option to consider.
(and here’s another reason — http://www.alabamawx.com/?p=62309 )