The buzz and controversy surrounding Facebook’s forthcoming “Like vs. Fan” terminology change overshadowed another potential game-changer announced by Facebook last week – the creation of Community Pages. While this change may make it easier for brands to claim to their own “official” Facebook turf, it also opens a new set of marketing opportunities and challenges.
Facebook’s goal for the Community Pages initiative is to create greater distinction between users’ efforts to build unofficial communities relating to brands, entertainers and other public figures and the planned and targeted efforts of brand owners and managers.
Currently, the mix of “official” and “unofficial” pages has not only caused confusion for users, but has also placed brand marketers in the awkward position of deciding among three unappealing choices: 1) coexist with these pages, 2) ask Facebook to shut them down or 3) merge them into the official page. While some brands have benefited from being able to grow quickly by consolidating unofficial pages, many more have seen their growth on the platform slowed by unintended competition from their own brand-enthusiasts.
“We’ve seen all the creative ways our users have used the product to capture the causes, topics, and ideas that they care about,” said Meredith Chin, Facebook spokesperson. “So we’ve created community pages to give our users opportunities to express their enthusiasm and creativity, while allowing for official pages to continue representing official entities such as businesses, bands, and public figures.”
enter:new media sees this change as both a solution and a challenge. Separating these two types of pages will make it easier for brands to stake out and defend their own branded space on the platform without “competing” with organically grown communities.
At the same time, we foresee users embracing the new Community Pages concept – rallying support for and against a number of brand-related topics. Brand marketers will have to sharpen their tactics and establish best practices around seeding, encouraging, promoting, communicating with and enabling organic Facebook communities that relate to their brand.
These skills will need to cleverly combine aspects of several disciplines – digital PR, community relations, partnership marketing, content publishing and potentially application development – to realize the potential connected directly to their brand as and indirectly through related community pages.
Tags: brand managers, brands, Community Pages, Facebook fan pages, Facebook social media, fan pages, social media marketing