Facebook Fan Pages: Their community, your name, a win-win premise?

Molecular was one of the first agencies to develop a branded application on Facebook. A lot has changed since that first iteration of the Facebook Platform API. I doubt many initially thought Facebook would remain as successful for this long, let alone keep growing at its torrid pace. While the Application Platform matures and evolves, the new darlings, especially among brands, are Facebook brand/fan pages and Facebook Connect. In this first of two posts, I will discuss Facebook fan pages and what you should know before setting your brand up with one. A following post will provide a look at what Facebook Connect can do for you.

Advantages
1. Access to the Facebook Social Graph
Looking to tap into Facebook millions of users is a no brainer. Facebook’s user mass visits the site for hours every day and many look for more reasons to stick around. A fan page gives users opportunities to congregate, talk, and react. It is up to you to make your page relevant to users so they not only become your fans on Facebook, they tell their friends about it. Starbucks made itself relevant by leveraging Facebook fan pages early on. The coffee house chain that is so much more, created a page to help it connect with and stoke its devoted following. Fans get the inside scoop about promotions and events, and a place where they can hold a conversation with the brand they care for a love so much.

2. Low Cost of Entry
Getting a Facebook page up and running takes a matter of minutes. Just go to Facebook’s new page application (login required) and set up a page for your brand. That’s it. But before diving in, you would be smart to look to see if a brand fan page already exists. Despite some warnings in place, nothing prevents users from creating a fan (or hate) page for your brand. An existing page can spare you the user recruitment effort as you can try to embrace its owners and give them your official umbrella. Regardless creation date, all pages come with familiar features – a wall, discussion boards, video and photo galleries, as well as others. All of these features at your fingertips, at no cost. Now get the excitement going.

3. Traction
So how are your ads, Google keywords and affiliates faring? Research from ViTrue appears to point to another strength of Facebook pages: brand messages on the fan page wall get a much higher click-through rates than ads. That’s so not surprising given that the people who visit your fan page are normally actively interested in what your brand has to say. And if you post your message, do it on Tuesday, ok?

Disadvantages

If you are drooling and dialing your agency to just make sure you have a killer fan page, let’s review what lies between you and a great fan page.

1. Fans remain strangers
For all the joys of tapping into Facebook’s vast social graph, Facebook keeps information about your fans well under its control. Keep in mind that this information is at the heart of Facebook’s business model and you are really playing in their world. All you essentially get to know about an individual is his/her Facebook ID and if they are a fan or not. Facebook does give you rudimentary analytics, such as age, gender, country, city and language, but any attempt to customize your content or improve its aim will remain a guess. And unless you employ applications, you don’t get to view even the minimal data you get from Facebook about your users. One thing should be clear: Facebook is not a CRM data acquisition play.

2. It gets complicated quickly
So what can you do to make your page stand out and give it some pop? Like profile pages, your page can have a Facebook platform application installed on it. Applications can do amazing things and developers can even gear their apps for installation on fan pages. The problem is, most app developers don’t care much for companies and a great many applications break or just don’t work on fan pages. Part of the issue is that pages confuse the Facebook platform. Whenever an application runs on a Facebook profile page, it gets to ‘see’ the user who installed it. On a fan page, that ‘user’ is the fan page; there is no individual behind it, and that is a big problem. To make matters worse, the mere installation of applications on a fan page is a slightly convoluted process, and setting up application properties is more puzzling still.

So what can you do? Beverage maker VitaminWater follows the best practice on its fan page. You ‘install’ an application into the brand page, where the application is really a link that will send the user to the installation page for a real application that will run on a user’s profile. In this way, your brand will get to interact with an actual user and not with a stranger.

VitaminWater's Facebook Fan Page - Install our application

Needless to say, application development costs money and adoption rates vary wildly. VitaminWater made its application more interesting by giving fans a say on the future flavors it will produce, something that helped to fuel installations. Beyond costs, brands also need to make sure that the applications work; a buggy or slow application can hurt brand image and perception with the very people who love it most.

3. Bribes cost money
So how do you get people to join your page? Clicking the ‘Become a fan’ link takes a lot of motivation. Beyond the hard core folks who actually love what you have to sell, others need some convincing. Coupons can definitely help: clothing and house wares chain Kohl’s promised users discount coupons if they became fans. Just make sure you can live up to a promise. Starbucks ice cream, produced by Unilever, caught flack for promising coupons for free pints but then ran out of the number allotted for daily disbursement. TGI Friday’s is recruiting fans on TV, promising free $5 burgers to those who become fans. Others, like WholeFoods, invest in content that showcases the unique variety of products sold at the chain’s stores. Links also helped drive traffic to the company’s web site where more content was available. In conclusion, attracting users takes an investment, so get the budget ready.

Fan Woody, have meat: TGI Friday wants to be friends and puts its beef in the game

Facebook Pages: Take the plunge.
Fan pages’ potential is enormous. We all know about brand ambassadors and their ability to positively influence their peers on a brand’s behalf. Fan pages offer you access to individuals who want to know more about your brand and are willingly associating with it. As such, the fan page not only spare you research hours looking for such ambassadors; it can also give you a chance to make new ones out of the already converted. Furthermore, fan pages offer a low cost of entry into this world as well as the ability to dabble for a short time before you commit to supporting the medium wholeheartedly. Just remember – leave the sales-speak to ads.