Changes to Artists House’s Facebook Presence

As many of you know, Artists House’s Facebook presence currently consists of a traditional user profile and a group. However, we have decided to add another page into the mix: an Artists House fan page. And as Andrew wisely pointed out, the undertaking of driving the 2,300 + people attracted by the Artists House user profile and group to a new Facebook destination can be turned into a learning experience for the Artists House community.

To that end, this entry will cover our reasons for launching a fan page and the advantages/disadvantages of Facebook’s fan pages as they relate to artists. Follow-up entries will cover our strategy for driving our current Facebook friends/group members to the new destination and whether or not we feel that completely shutting down our old Facebook pages and solely using the new fan page would be wise.

Artists House initially opted to go with a traditional profile page rather than a fan page because Facebook’s old fan pages would have served little purpose in helping us achieve the goal of our social media campaign: to bring an interactive aspect to Artists House, thereby keeping the site from solely remaining a “broadcast”. Static and essentially acting as “billboards” (a la MySpace profiles), the old Facebook fan pages, while offering some benefits, were simply not the best option for reaching this goal.

Thankfully, Facebook revamped its fan pages this year. The new fan pages still offer the benefits of the old fan pages, but they are now much more “social”. With this in mind, our reasons for beginning the transition to a fan page are as follows:

— The new fan pages and traditional user profiles now share many similar aspects, allowing for more social actions than the old fan pages did. For example, fan page status updates now appear in the Facebook news feeds of the page’s fans. Furthermore, a fan page’s administrators can now also choose to publish other content (photos, videos, etc.) to the page’s wall, making it appear in the news feeds of fans.

— Unlike a traditional user profile that caps a user’s number of friends at 5,000, a fan page imposes no limit on the number of people that can become fans.

— By using a fan page instead of a traditional user profile, you do not have to deal with the hassle of sifting through the inevitable onslaught of group invites, events invites, and page suggestions that go hand in hand with having a large number of friends on a traditional user profile. Furthermore, you don’t have to manually accept friend requests with a fan page; people can automatically become fans.

— Unlike a group that no longer allows you to send out mass messages to members after 5,000 members have been exceeded, a fan page allows you to send out mass updates to a limitless number of fans.

— Rather than only allowing you to send mass messages to all fans (like the old fan pages did), the new fan pages also give you the option to send geographically and/or demographically targeted messages to fans by country, state/province, city, sex, and/or age.

Note: This is a particularly useful feature for touring artists because it allows them to send out messages announcing a tour to all of their Facebook fans and to then follow up these mass messages with region-specific messages closer to each date. By doing so, they can send reminders about each specific date to fans in the surrounding areas without flooding the inboxes of fans for whom this information would not be relevant.

— The new fan pages have a feature called “Insights Tool”. This is an analytics tool that gives page administrators information on how fans are interacting with their pages and on fan demographics. You can learn more about the “Insights” feature here: www.insidefacebook.com/2009/05/05/facebook-upgrading-insights-metrics-dashboard-for-page-managers-tonight

— Fan pages can have their own discussion boards, allowing you to consolidate your Facebook presence since there’s no need to have a separate group for a discussion board.

— You have the option to advertise a fan page with Facebook ads.

Sounds like opting to solely use a fan page is a no-brainer, right? Well, even with all of these benefits, fans pages are not without their flaws:

— Presently, Facebook does not allow you to change the name of your fan page; you would need to start a new page from scratch. (Clearly, this is a major negative for bands or companies who change their names after having attracted a large number of fans to their original pages.)

— Administrators cannot view the profiles of their page’s fans. (There’s always value in being able to view the profiles of your most active fans and use what you find to create an outline of your target audience.)

Even so, it’s likely that Facebook will eventually fix some of these issues. Regardless, it’s looking like the pros of fan pages outweigh the cons, but we will continue to keep our original pages active until we have some tangible results to examine; stay tuned for the future blog entries detailing our findings.

In the meantime, we hope to see you all connect with us on Facebook through the new fan page. This badge will bring you directly to it:

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