When Facebook released the upgraded version of public profiles (formerly “Pages”) a couple weeks ago, they gave businesses and public figures access to a new direct channel of communication with fans: the news feed. Since then, comments and “likes” of public profile stories have jumped substantially and many are finding the redesign to be much more effective at engaging users. There are still many features that are lacking though.

Insufficient Reporting Metrics

While Facebook’s public profile “Insights” provide a decent amount of information about how users are interacting with your public profile, there is still a ton of information absent from the metrics. The primary one is ad conversion. Currently Facebook encourages public page owners to use Facebook ads to promote their pages. I’ve been playing with this for a while now and have had great results (I’ll post more about this in the future) but unfortunately I can’t track conversion rates.

If I could run multivariate testing as well as A-B split testing on my various ad campaigns, I could optimize the amount spent and reduce my effective “cost per fan”. My guess is that Facebook will be providing an improved insights system in the near future. Why? It will increase the amount spent on advertising as well as increase their long-term ad revenue since brands will invest heavily in promoting their public profiles.

Direct Chat Would Provide Instant Communication

Imagine if you were able to visit the public profile of a local store and they were able to chat directly with you. For example if you want to schedule an appointment with your local doctor, it would be useful to have a quick chat conversation with the somebody that handles scheduling who will also be able to answer your questions.

Ultimately there are a number of applications that provide instant chat but so far most businesses haven’t taken advantage of them. Facebook could easily integrate their public profiles into chat and this would help create a valuable way for instant communication.

Fan Lists Would Provide CRM Functionality

If you’ve used Salesforce then you know how it’s possible to track the sources of every “lead”. Ultimately Facebook may not perceive public profiles as a lead generation system but if you are going to pay for fans (and you aren’t a media company), you are going to want to generate revenue from them. If there were “fan lists” which would be the public profile version of “friend lists”, public profile admins could effectively organize fans into manageable groups.

Many More Features To Come

Facebook has said that the intention is to merge public profiles and user profiles into a similar if not identical product. If this is really their full intention, I’d assume that there will be many more features to come in the coming weeks and months that help businesses to interact directly with existing and new customers. What upgrades are you hoping for? If you are looking for more information about how your business can take advantage of public profiles and Facebook, fill out the form below and you’ll be first to find out about a new program we’ll be announcing shortly.

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