Free the Updates! An Open Letter to Facebook

Dear Facebook,

As someone who works with businesses and helps them build and maintain their Facebook Business Pages, I have a bit of a beef with you. Previously, we had three great ways to get information out to our page fans:

Notes – the note shows up on your wall, and your fans’ newsfeeds. Plus it has the bonus of being shareable.

Events – The event invitation shows up on the wall and can be sent to specific individuals (though it would be nice if you could invite everyone on the fan page with one click, which can be done through Facebook groups).

Updates – Works like a Facebook message or email and shows up in the Inbox.

My favorite method used to be the update because it acted like an email and went to the inbox of every fan of the page. We would get a notification in the upper right hand corner of our Facebook login page.

Within the past few months, Facebook decided to no longer let users know that they have an Update from a Fan Page. Instead, the only way you know about them is by going to your Inbox and looking at the Updates tab.

So from my perspective, the “Send an Update to Fans” option has been completely emasculated. It serves almost no function. I’m now telling my clients to not even bother with updates. Most updates are usually time sensitive, so why bother if no one is going to see them until it’s too late?

Dear, dear Facebook. Please bring back the notifications for Updates. I know that some people don’t like getting a lot of updates and they see it as a form of spam. But they were the ones that opted in to becoming Fans of their favorite pages. They can always hit the delete button, or remove themselves as Fans. And of course, as Page admins, it is our responsibility to know how many updates is too many!

Thank you for listening.

Your Fan,

Ken at Inkling Media.

Tagged as: facebook, Marketing, Social Media