I wrote a few weeks ago about how Facebook are making it incredibly difficult for companies to use their interface. Since I wrote that they’ve made a couple more changes that make it even more difficult.
No way to update your fans
First Facebook took away the ability to send the fans of your page a direct message. They left the functionality to send an update to your fans, but you only see this if you actually go into your updates and you don’t get an email notification either. Now they’ve taken that away as well, so there is no real way to contact your fans directly. Now, if someone’s become a fan of your page, then they’re interested in your brand and your content. I can’t see why Facebook would take away the option to message someone if they’ve clearly stated that they’re interested in your content. They seem to have changed rules for developers, to allow you to contact email addresses on an application but I wouldn’t imagine many people would opt to do this and it’s still not an option for small businesses that don’t have the resource to build their own application.
Can’t run a competition on your own page
Facebook recently changed their guidelines on promotions and sweepstakes, making it harder for people to run their own competition. In short, in order to run a competition you have to do this through an application as a tab on a page. You might be able to use an existing app, but if you want a quality app that’s branded then you’re going to have to pay a developer for this. Not something many smaller businesses will be able to afford. Subsequently, if you want to promote your competition in any way, you need written permission from Facebook 7 days prior to running your competition. And good luck getting to a contact at Facebook in order to get this – you’ll need to spend about $10,000 per month on advertising before you get that privilege.
What happened to the Facebook box?
It used to be the case that there was a simple link to add a fanbox to your site, which has now disappeared (before and after below)
That’s now gone and when you click on the link to ‘promote your page’ in the edit screen, that just takes you straight through to the Advertising link. I’ve no doubt there will be some dark corner within Facebook where you can access the box, or you can find a widget online but they’re certainly not making it easy for you. Shame, because all that’s doing is ultimately driving more people back to their site.
Facebook are clearly courting the advertisers here. The recent changes to their ad API, as well as promoting their own platform heavily within Facebook itself, demonstrate this (the ad below happened to pop up in my profile last night). 
Incidentally, why they think it’s an advantage to a page owner that someone can become a fan in the ad itself rather than visiting your page is beyond me.
The shift is increasingly in favour of those with the advertising dollars, which is good for some, but unfortunately makes Facebook less of a social platform. And if anyone thinks that all it takes to become a viral hit on Facebook is a good idea, then you should read how much Farmville spent on advertising.
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The documentation for Facebook is a dog as well – I had to end up using Google to find the revised guidelines and the terms & conditions for promoting pages, as the site links are crap. For example, try finding the rules for linking to a Facebook fan page via a banner ad without using Google – it’s a pain in the ass
Yeah I had a nightmare with it myself. They certainly don’t get any awards for Plain English. Generally forums are useful for this kind of thing, but not a replacement for the official word from Facebook.
I want to know how to stop those updates on how people are doing with their farm… Very good post, what is the next step then? Is this the end of open social media?
Well unfortunately that’s the way it seems to be going for Facebook. Pages are still a great option for businesses, but just not as open as they used to be. It’ll be interesting to see what else they introduce…
Great post Loz. It’s clear all the limitations that Facebook is giving to pages, unfortunately the majority make no sense at all. Last week, I did a lot of research to fin the TOP Facebook pages in the world and see if they found the key to something I wasn’t aware of. The best you can find is personalised tabs with images and HTML text (with very poor styles). On top of this, the majority of those personalised pages look like websites from 1997. I’m sure that’s not even close to the best that Facebook can offer. Only one nice improvement I have to mention.. is being able to target messages based on country and language: http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/11/facebook-target-stream-stories/
Best
Fred
great post lauren, didn’t know about the competition changes,
@patrick if you hover over any farmville updates and click the hide button on the right hand side you’re able to hide the whole application – it’s great
It’s all true!
Fan Box still there folks..Click Edit page, Scroll down on the right and you will see it there. Agreed about everything else!
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Good post. This is obviously about forcing brand-owner dependency on ads in order to get anything done on facebook, with all the natural viral potential removed. It doesn’t just spoil things for brands that don’t currently buy ads, but also messes things up for those that spend thousands. Pushing users to pages for competitions and contests was one of the most effective ways to begin engaging. Clicks on ads will be tougher to get and FB will lose out on CPC income. How now to connect with new audiences through FB ads – which are hugely limited anyway – is going to become a real head-scratcher, and I’m guessing more will look to take users off FB and to their own sites. And 7 day approval is just a joke. Brands should be recognised for the value that they add for users (if they are doing it right) rather than the value they could add to facebook ad revenue.