The Problem With Becoming A Fan Of Brands On Facebook (And The Solution)
Brands and businesses love getting new fans on Facebook. Brands pay lots of money in Facebook advertising to acquire more fans, people build amazing apps to acquire fans in “viral” ways and basically the race is on to acquire fans at whatever cost. Having fans if you are a brand is brilliant as it allows you to push out content, special deals and updates to thousands of people who will hopefully interact with your brand and even become customers of yours online. So it’s a great solution for brands but on the flip side I am not sure if as a user I want to be a fan of a brand? Do I really want a business pushing updates in to my personal stream every time I log in? How many brands can I manage in my stream without them taking it over from the one reason I actually want to be in there which is to converse and interact with my friends. Luckily is seems that as usual Facebook are ahead of the game and in leaked documents they are changing the whole mechanic of becoming a fan very soon…
The Problem
Do I really want to be friends with a large corporate organization or a business? You have to think that businesses are on Facebook to promote themselves. They are not there to be friends with you and like your photos and play games with you but they are there to improve their bottom line, simple as that. Now the smart brands are not going to be trying the hard sell and pushing their goods on you non stop but will instead be creating content that adds real value and trying to engage in meaningful conversation with their fans. The main problem is that I have become fans with lots of brands by accident, i’ll have seen a great piece of content they created or entered a competition to win a prize they had on offer and although at that very moment I wanted to become a fan to win something I probably don’t love the brand enough to want their content coming in to my stream a couple of times a day. There are some exceptions where companies post deals of real value or where they use Facebook for customer service but on the whole companies see Facebook as a way of engaging users to ultimately sell more of their goods.
The Facebook Solution
Facebook are smart. Very smart. We already know that and although they have put themselves in the enviable position where brands pay to have users re-directeded within the Facebook platform (Brands pay to have advertising on Facebook that gets them more fans) they have clearly come to the conclusion that this is not the perfect long term solution. Facebook need to preserve the user experience because without their users they really have nothing. It’s clear that users becoming fans of brands might not always be the best solution so Facebook have decided to take the emphasis off becoming a fan of a brand and are about to roll out the new “Like” feature for pages and all over the web to be added to 3rd party websites. You may already know the like button from your own personal profile where you can like photos, videos, links and other content. By rolling this out on pages this will allow users to make a smaller connection with a brand when they see content that they like rather than having to become a fan and commit yourself to the brand in the long term and be open to a constant barrage of content. Here is the document that Facebook shared with advertisers last week to let them know what was coming…
What Is The Long Term Goal For Facebook?
To fully understand this move by Facebook you have to look at the bigger picture and think of what can happen with these new “like” buttons off site and not on Facebook itself. The plan is very much to allow websites and publishers all over the world to start integrating the like button on to their own sites. Imagine if this post had a like button at the end of the post for example. You might like the content we write and want to tell your friends about this article but not become a fan of Simple Zesty and that is what Facebook is essentially trying to do. They are trying to become a fabric of the web. If I see a great advert by Coca Cola I should be able to instantly like it alerting my friends and sharing that link rather than having to become a fan. It’s all about moving even further towards a real time web and creating a community where you share content with your friends all over the web with Facebook as the main hub for that sharing.
Will It Work?
The reason that Facebook are out front as the default social media platform is that they have balls to make hard decisions. They are never scared to upset their users and take the site in a new direction. This is a bold move because they could be upsetting their advertisers which is a whole different ball game. Businesses and brands seem to be very happy with fans solution at the moment and even though the numbers game is not what social media is about the fan metric is something very simple that brands can understand and relate to. I personally think it is a very smart move and although it will certainly mean fewer fans for pages in the short term the long term benefits of being able to promote content on 3rd party sites and push it back in to Facebook are immense. This should be rolling out very soon and I would predict that it will within 6 months be a massive success and only help Facebook grow even further.
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