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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Nice post, Nick. I agree the public profile changes are a major step…including Pages in the news feed is huge. We have seen significant increases in commenting and "linking" on our Mayo Clinic page. Much better than being relegated to Updates only.
Comment by Lee Aase — March 30, 2009 @ 5:14 am
Features I want:
- The ability to comment on a Page you admin as yourself.
- The ability for people to send personal messages to a Page / Public Profile.
- The ability to tag people in Page Notes (I can tag people in Page Photos, why can't I tag them in Notes?)
Comment by Dominic Grant — March 30, 2009 @ 6:32 am
Question i have:
will application about page become same public profile page ?
Comment by Knight Tan — March 31, 2009 @ 4:26 am
The changes to Facebook Pages (particularly putting updates in "fans" news feeds) are huge for organizations. However, Facebook seems to have made some other really dumb changes that now hinder the ability of people to connect with Pages.
Here are 5 things related to Pages I think Facebook needs to fix:
http://blog.ourchurch.com/2009/03/31/facebook-pag...
Comment by Paul Steinbrueck — March 31, 2009 @ 6:49 am
1. Returning fan notices to the news feed would be great. The removal of this in the redesign has dramatically slowed the growth of pages.
2. Location information in the insights would be helpful… I could see how many fans are british vs american vs italian etc…
3. Allow me to join the discussion in a page I administer
4. I would like two changes in the video app functionality for facebook pages
a. allow me to remove certain fan videos like i can remove fan pictures
b. allow me to upload videos and choose NOT to distribute them to all my fans via the stream… i want to add a lot of videos, but I do not want fans to become annoyed because they see so much activity from a single page in their newsfeed. (which would cause them to remove my updates from their feed)
Comment by Carson Mehl — March 31, 2009 @ 8:41 am
I like what they've done so far but would also like:
the ability to tag FANS in photos not just friends
I would like the chat and a message inbox
Comment by Nancy Nardi — April 2, 2009 @ 1:20 pm
Somebody had deleted or changed my E-mail passward and I cannot operate my Facebook account.
Kindly help
MAHESH SINGH
Comment by Mahesh Singh — May 7, 2010 @ 6:50 am