Ever since Facebook launched the new design earlier this year one of the most interesting features was the new power given to Facebook Pages. Every item posted to pages showed up in fans’ news feed and I have been a fervent promoter and user of these pages, there where before I hardly ever used the platform for social marketing. The possibility to constantly drop links to blog updates without filling my own Facebook profile was a god send. I have managed to launch a blog almost entirely based on its Facebook page as sole and only promotion platform, but the future might be different and the social network could become useless as a promotion engine.
When Facebook threatened with a possible update to its ToS they also possibly killed the power of Facebook Pages for bloggers.
If in recent months I started a Facebook page for almost everything, often with great success for small blogs, they very often have proved most useful to market and promote local businesses. Not every time have they reached the same success as traffic referrer than (automated) Twitter accounts, but I have seen many ‘Likes’ and comments on updates, even on ‘New chocolate cake just arrived‘ updates for a local coffee shop. I never put a real emphasis on comments on my blogs as long as the traffic came in or the marketing machine seemed to work and my Facebook pages drove business.
Things are bound to change with the update the update to Facebook’s policies:
When you publish content or information to your Page we have no obligation to distribute your content or information to users.
If Facebook applies this update after the community has had the occasion to leave feedback on the proposed changes until 18th August 10.00PDT, Facebook Pages will lose every interest in my strategies and I will quickly forget about updating my pages. Probably I will even delete every fan block from my own sites.
What will you do? Will you still consider Facebook a valuable platform to promote your sites or will you revert to promote your sites on your own Facebook profile?
3 thoughts on “Facebook Pages, Short-lived Fad or Still Useful?”
I also promote some of my affiliate links on Facebook by making Facebook fan pages and also by advertising on Facebook.:`.
I think it’s more likely, given the push by users to have more granular privacy controls, that FB is doing a CYA in case a user becomes a fan of a page but chooses to opt out of receiving posts and/or having them show up in their news feed. They can’t continue to guarantee that they can post it if the user chooses not to have it posted.
Remember that they have to respond to non-US privacy laws that are stricter – consider the legal issue they are dealing with in Canada.
You make a very good point, but don’t you think Facebook put this in their TOS just so that if something doesn’t get posted they are covered and NOT stating that they won’t post items??? just a thought? If it is true you are correct in that it will change how and if facebook pages will be used.
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