I’m completely fascinated by online social-networking and in the near future I’m giving two conference presentations about Facebook. My colleagues are aware of my research interest in Facebook and this week Michael informed me that Facebook had released their beta version of Facebook Pages. According to PC World, 100,000 Facebook Pages were made in the first 24-hours of release. To explain Pages in a nutshell, their purpose is to connect businesses to their customers. Of course, librarians wasted no time creating Pages for their libraries — check here for the group Librarians Using Facebook Pages and the Page I created for the Valley Library at Oregon State University.
You might ask yourself, “How are Facebook Groups different than a Facebook Pages?” Let me explain a bit further. The average Facebook user joins a Group simply as a way to show support or unity with a group of people. Once you join a Group, you have to visit the Group site to see if there are any updates or changes. I assume most people are like me — I join a Group, like “1,000,000 Strong for Stephen Colbert,” and read the Group’s page the same day I sign up, and then I never look at it again. It would be too annoying to check every Group every day, so I simply don’t check any of the Groups at all.
Enter Facebook Pages. When I join a Facebook Page, I become a “Fan” of the Page and I don’t have to check the Page for updates, instead all updates are continually fed to my Facebook Newsfeed, which I, and other active Facebook users, check on a daily basis. Also, Pages allow you to add different Facebook Applications to the Page — although I’ve noticed most of them are not working yet (blame it on the beta stage). In the future, it should be possible to add Meebo or the JSTOR Application to the Page.
To create a Facebook Page you need to login to your profile and go to the bottom of the page and click on the “Businesses” link. Then select “Facebook Pages“.
Reminder: Facebook Pages are still in the beta stage and there are some bugs to-be fixed. For example, when I entered the hours of operation into the Valley Library Page, it erased the hours every time I updated a different section of the Page. After entering in the hours three times I gave up.
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Me too on the Group (non) activity! There seems to be a certain psychology behind joining FB Groups just to say, “Hey, this is something I support and want my community to know about.” Then, it’s a case of “Next!!”
But, with FB Pages - hmmm, I’m waiting with bated breath to see the impact. I’m not sure how much of a “fan-sumer” I want to be… I could probably count on one (maybe two!) hands the businesses I’d want my community to know I fully support. As a business person myself, however, I do like the idea of populating my fans’ feeds. We’ll see!!
Cheers,
Mari
I’m really excited by this too.
I tried it out with my boyfriend’s company to see what it was like but couldn’t work out how to add more admin, however they seem to have updated the system again since I last looked and you can now do this. I’m hoping to set up a page for our library but I need to get permission first.
I think this could really be a great way of updating our students, a quick wander round any of our IT suites tells me that a LOT of students use FaceBook on a regular basis. Fingers crossed we can set up a page!
I agree that the new Facebook pages provide a nice way to communicate with your fan-base and to learn of cool places and businesses from people you trust - your friends. I’ve been working on a facebook application for Wi-Fi HotSpots whereby you (the HotSpot owner) and your (profile) friends get automatically logged in. It was easy enough to extend the application to work with pages too - using the (very nice) Facebook platform. You might find this application useful in your library or school. Thus far, I think Facebook has done a very good job with their platform - even if they do update it often and have bugs as a result. At least they seem to fix problems quickly and be mindful of privacy along the way.