Facebook Community Pages - What a Mess
By Paul Greenhalgh in Social Media Marketing on Friday, June 25, 2010 @ 09:27
Spot the difference:
- http://www.facebook.com/pages/I-COM/118124928207387
This I-COM page is the page created automatically by Facebook after various members of I-COM staff said that they worked here. Facebook currently refers to this as a community page. - http://www.facebook.com/pages/Manchester-United-Kingdom/I-COM/18443009124
This I-COM page is the page created by I-COM with links to other official sources and "liked" by a similar group of people to the above page.
Facebook offers the gesture of involvement:
"Our goal is to make this Community Page the best collection of shared knowledge on this topic. If you have a passion for I-COM, sign up and we'll let you know when we're ready for your help. You can also get us started by suggesting a relevant Wikipedia article or the Official Site."
However, the signup and the suggest box feel a little hollow. Despite providing both the official site, providing the address of the I-COM business page and signing up to offer help, I've had no email feedback - which I find surprising for Facebook - and surely we at I-COM should have control over what appears on a page about us on Facebook (or whether we appear at all), not the powers that be at Facebook.
Furthermore, much of the information being pulled into the community page has nothing whatsoever to do with us (click on image to enlarge):
I am in favour of online services adding extra functionality, but if there is no support documentation, multiple features cover essentially the same ground, and they provide inaccurate information, they add no value and only confuse users.
Mindy wrote:
Jun 25, 2010 - 09:39Frankly, calling that a "community" page is misleading. What "community" does it serve? Especially when it just pulls any reference to the word "I-COM" or any vague semi-spelling of it onto the wall?
Those posts are hardly from a "community" of users discussing the same thing but instead are a bunch of random remarks, including mis-spellings of "I come" made by people from around the world who are not looking for digital marketing and never will.
Facebook need to stop messing with people's data and repurposing it or they'll find increasing numbers of people unwilling to participate in their "community" at all.
Alex Moss wrote:
Jun 25, 2010 - 09:45The worst thing about these pages is that you can't "claim" them as your own and merge it with the page already set up. This is just another way of building a load of pages without doing a lot of heavy lifting.
JamesD wrote:
Jun 25, 2010 - 12:02I agree with Alex and Mindy, when I first heard about this I thought "Great, that means I can add seo-able updates to my company page through my own".
But no.
Trust Mark Zuckerbeg to find another way for Facebook to sell information!
Paul wrote:
Jun 25, 2010 - 13:05@Alex Moss: I agree it's lazy page building but then with the majority of Facebook's content being locked behind login and their high site traffic, they have no need for additional content in the way a more conventional site might. It seems more like they are considering some sort of wiki, but it has just been badly implemented!
@JamesD: You really think they're going to try to sell us advertising space on our own community pages? That would be low!
It's something I'll be keeping an eye on, I'll update the post if anything changes.
Mindy wrote:
Jun 25, 2010 - 15:18These Facebook pages are ranking. Did a random search trying to get a definition (or proof it's a word) of 'pinting' and the Facebook Community Page came up 4th in the organic results (http://twitpic.com/1ztma2) for a page that's mainly pulling misspellings of 'pointing' and 'painting' (http://twitpic.com/1ztmiy/full). It's a load of old gibberish.
Well done Google! Well done Facebook!