2 Solutions to a Big Problem with Facebook Business Pages

In a recent conversation on my Facebook page, a friend expressed some frustration with Facebook Business pages. He voiced the discontent of many when he complained about the inability of paged administrators to “message” all of the fans on his page. You can send an “update” to your fans, but as I’ve written previously, updates are rather useless these days.

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For this reason, my friend continues to use Facebook groups as a means for communicating with fans. While you can message your group members, and even invite all of them to events related to that group, there are a few problems inherent with Facebook groups:

• There are limits on messaging – Once you hit 5,000 members in a group, you lose the ability to message them.
• Groups have little SEO value – Groups are indexable by Google and other search engines, but don’t have the full SEO power of a page. Pages allow for much more optimization.
• Groups are less “viral” – When people comment and interact with a group page, that engagement is not reflected on their home page or in their news feed. On a page, all of these engagements have the ability tospread across Facebook and the web.
• Groups allow for less targeting – If you publish an update in a group, you can’t customize who sees it in their news feed stream.
• Groups aren’t app friendly – You can’t add applications to groups. But there are all sorts of apps that can be used in conjunction with Facebook pages, that allow for increased optimization and functionality.
• Groups don’t allow for analytics – Other than comments, there is no way to see what type of interaction you are getting with a group. Pages, however, have been getting increasingly robust analytics through the “insights” feature. These can be very valuable tools.
• Groups are less promotable – There isn’t much you can do to promote a group outside of linking to them in text. Pages can be promoted across the web through customizable widgets.
• Groups have “ugly” URLs – With a group, you’re stuck with the lengthy alpha-numeric URL that Facebook randomly assigns to you. But on a page you can customize your user name and get a “vanity URL” which makes it easier tell others how to find you.

Now this brings me one of the major problems with Facebook Business pages, and what I believe can be done about it:

Currently, page admins are unable to message page fans, or even invite them to events that you have created through that page. I’m not sure about this, but I think the logic behind this is that it is an effort to prevent businesses from overusing the message function, or spamming fans. The idea behind Facebook pages is to keep the engagement and conversation public and on the wall, but it would be nice to have the messaging capabilities of groups.

Two possible solutions:

1) Let smart marketing win out – Just give page administrators the ability to send messages and invite fans to events. If businesses abuse the privilege and spam their fans, those fans will leave. In other words, let the market police itself. As marketers and business owners we walk the fine line of knowing how much is too much. There is no formula; it’s different for every business. But let us have the power to communicate directly with our fans (outside of our page walls), and we will make sure we don’t abuse the privilege. Those who do, will suffer for it.

2) Give users the chance to opt-out of messaging and invites – When someone “likes” a business page, they already have the option of opting out in some ways by hiding status updates from particular pages on their news feeds. Why not go a step further. Give marketers the ability to message them and invite them to events, but also give individuals the ability to opt-out of either or both of those for each individual page. I might want to “like” a particular page, but don’t want to receive messages from them. As a user, I should be given the choice to opt out.

So Facebook, give businesses the chance to message their fans, and then give fans the option of whether they want to receive those messages or not. In this way, it becomes much more like e-mail marketing, but still allows Facebook to do what it does best: create and maintain conversation.

And if businesses have access to information about how many people are opting out, or leaving their page, then they will be forced to think hard about their marketing tactics.

What do you think? Do you have any other ideas that might work for businesses?

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