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.
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This afternoon Tom Krieglstein sent me a video of an interesting glitch that took place to him which gave him administrative access to a number of large brand pages including Star Wars, American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and a number of others. He also was able to send out updates to the Stars Wars page (aka “public profile”) which has over 800,000 fans currently.
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I’ve received countless emails over the past two weeks from users that have been confused about integrating their blog into their new public profile. I don’t blame them for the confusion as it took me days to figure out how to get this working. Finally after a little bit of exploring, I figured out how to get your blog imported via the Facebook Notes application.
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Yesterday I began doing some research to determine if there was a shift taking place among top Twitter users and Facebook users given the new Facebook design. I was trying to determine the most effective barometer of user influence across both sites and the only thing I could come up with was a comparison of the top users on each site. After a couple hours I had broken down the top 50 Twitter users and top 50 Facebook public profiles to determine how the two sites stack up against each other.
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Yesterday I wrote that Facebook was automatically hiding pages that users were previously fans of prior to the new design change. At the time I couldn’t figure out the logic behind the separation of hidden and visible public profiles. I reached out to Facebook but received no clarification on the matter. Yesterday evening I noticed a small box at the top of my feed that appeared to have a clarification. The box states:
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Since the launch of Facebook’s redesign, users have been filing their complaints about the new layout. Whether it’s problem’s with Facebook’s “real-time” news feed or issues with public profile feed updates not showing up in users’ feeds, we’ve been receiving a ton of feedback. This morning, Dominic Grant brought to our attention an issue with Public Profiles being hid by default. Those public profiles (previously called “pages”) that you subscribed to before the change, may not be showing up in your feed and we’ve found out why.
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During the middle of this evening’s CBS coverage of the NCAA Tournament, Vitamin Water launched a promotion referencing their Facebook public profile. This is one of the first television promotions I’ve seen of a company promoting their Facebook public profile instead of their own website. Yes, media companies have been quick to adopt in terms of promoting their Facebook and Twitter profiles but many consumer brands have hesitated to do any promotion of their Facebook pages outside of Facebook.

I remember only a couple of years ago when MySpace links were ubiquitous within television commercials. From bands to movies to consumer brands, there were plenty of large commercials referencing their MySpace pages which still remain much more customizable in terms of layout but no longer have the same distribution channels provided by Facebook.
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Facebook has revamped the public profiles for users and their are some noticeable changes. First of all, Facebook has increased the number of visible friends for an individual from 5 to 7. Even more significant is the increase in the number of visible fan pages, from 5 to 20. This means brand pages will receive more more SEO juice. It also appears that those fan page listings on public profiles are static.

So why on earth would Facebook be providing so much information on the public page? Easy, they want more search engine traffic. Getting traffic from Google can be pretty addictive and Facebook knows this better than anyone. While you can argue that the company wants to attract more traffic to brands, I’d suggest that it’s a fairly self-serving activity.
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