Personal Profile Pages

Before Facebook changed its interface to be more like an aggregator or life stream (FriendFeed) and microblog (Twitter) plus personal network, there was a bigger difference in how personal profiles and fan pages worked. Now, they look and act in a much more similar fashion. This means that the only real difference between them is in how they limit your brand growth on Facebook. Personal profile pages can only have 5000 friends. This isn’t a big deal to the average person, but it is if you are Gary Vaynerchuk, Robert Scoble or Jeff Pulver and others like them where your name IS your brand, so to speak.

What it means to a business is that you can only get 5000 friends. Businesses need to reach, listen to and engage far more than 5000 people on a social network to achieve measurable results. This makes the personal profile an unwise choice of message delivery, listening and engagement for a business or brand – it is like putting a cap on your own growth. That leaves you with two options: the fan page and the group.

Group Pages

The group page works very well if you are an organization, brand or business who is trying to get controlled discussions going and go viral to a target audience. The group interface makes it easier for people who belong to it to see where to put their content, how to set up a new threaded discussion or view ongoing ones to add their two cents, upload photos and more. Like all things in Facebook, groups share similar content capabilities with fan pages and personal profile pages, the user interface is just slightly different.

One key benefit to a group page that a fan page lacks is the ability to generate viral marketing. Not only can you bulk invite and bulk message in a group – your group members can bulk invite as well. This makes it much easier to populate a group with people quickly, generating almost immediate activity. It also makes it easier for a good, fun group to become viral. This makes it key to keep adding fresh content and topics to your group, and to encourage your group members to participate as well. Word of caution: be careful how many messages you send! Too many will have people unfollowing your group because it is spammy.

Groups have some fun participatory features that encourage involvement. Once of these is the ability to make people “officers” of the group, publicly recognizing their contribution to your brand without having to give them administrative privileges. This goes a long way toward encouraging goodwill (and on some group pages, the titles chosen are also a way to inject some humor into the page, like a roast). Other features that encourage involvement, like adding links and photos, can also be found on fan pages, though they get their own very easy to locate sections on the group pages for reference later. In fan pages they are part of the larger stream of information that is more relative to what’s going on in the moment.

Fan Pages

Fan pages are important if your brand needs to be indexed on Google. Currently, fan pages are the only Facebook area that can be fully seen by the search engine crawlers, so if you are looking for more exposure for your brand outside of Facebook as well as inside of Facebook, a fan page is the way to go for SEO. Fan pages are not quite as viral as groups: the invite feature limits the admin of the page to a few invites at a time, and does not let fans do much in the way of sharing the page at all. Also, you can’t make fans into officers to show appreciation on fan pages.

A fan page works a lot more like a profile page now that Facebook has made the changes mentioned earlier. This means that information goes to the wall or stream for continuing, real time updates similar to sites like Twitter. Not only that, it gets sent to your fans’ streams as well, just like a personal profile page would. You can add a small box to your sidebar to show photos and links, and a box for information on your company, such as business hours and similar hard info; however, not all people think to look there, whereas in the groups the design draws the user’s eye naturally down the page to the various categories.

Currently, fan pages are also the only way to get an URL (web address) that isn’t an atrociously long set of random numbers and letters. While it is imperfect still, the fan page URL does have your fan page name in it, so name your page well. As we watch Facebook roll out vanity URLs to some major users like Ashton Kutcher, we can’t help but think that soon people and businesses may have a way to get better URLs on all Facebook pages, though it isn’t clear if they will offer it for free or a fee.

While there are many things that are similar between group pages and fan pages, there are two things that make fan pages slightly stand out. One is the ability to add applications that are relevant to your business. For example, if you are a restaurant, Facebook fan pages let you integrate your existing Open Table account, as well as Zagat reviews and similar tools. Groups don’t integrate like that with applications. The other is the ability to offer tabs (like personal profile pages) across the top of the screen, to make it easier for your fans to navigate, then associate various fan levels with a landing page (for example, non-fans can be set to land on the tab for your detailed information, including hours of operation, while fans can be sent over to the live stream).

Other Issues To Think About

• Both group pages and fan pages offer event integration, though it is key to note if you use an outside service like EventBrite or Amiando to charge for tickets you may run into snags with people thinking that by signing up on Facebook to get your event added to their Facebook calendar application they are fully signed up for your list. It takes some finesse to direct them from the event on either style of page.

• You may want to consider having both a group and a fan page, if you have a little time to spend maintaining both, or if you have help from multiple admins. That way you can link between the two, sending fans and group members to both places. It also lets your brand reap the individual benefits of both styles – viral and indexing. It does increase your maintenance time, which is an issue for brands pressed for time.

• The last issue I’ll address is one with Facebook itself. Currently, when you are the administrator of a fan page, you do not show up as yourself when posting. This poses two issues. number one, it makes your stream look like a rolling advert with nothing but your logo making post after post, when in fact you are just conversing. Two, it doesn’t allow for differentiation between several admins, meaning they all look the same and fans can’t tell which company rep they are talking to unless the rep remembers to sign their update with some kind of identifier like ^lp, etc. it would be beneficial to see that change, reducing the confusion and annoyance it causes and allowing admins to show as their own profile image from their personal profile instead of the logo.

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I realize I only skimmed the surface of the capabilities of fan pages, group pages and personal profile pages. I didn’t discuss some of the finer points as this was intended as a quick sketch of why you might choose each one. More specifically, it was intended to show why choosing a personal profile page may be a bad choice for your business. I’ll go into some finer points of using Facebook in a separate post.

In order to truly tap the new possibilities that the social web offers for your business, you need to turn the way you think of ROI on its head. In the past, ROI has been a direct effort-to-money correlation. Marketers and companies could predict how many real and direct dollars would result from a certain off line ad campaign based on known factors like seasonal shopping habits, location, target markets and more.

The New Capitol

What sets ROI in a social media environment apart is the change in capitol. Where old ROI used to be direct money returned on invested time or budget, the new ROI is not money. The new capitol for any business is human capitol. Human capitol is abundant on both the enterprise side of the fence and the customer side of the fence. Instead of thinking of every thing you do as making money, think of it as cultivating people.

Engage and Listen

Ideally, you want to think of everything you do for your business in terms of engagement and listening. Marketing is no longer a soapbox with a captive audience. Now that your audience can find (and share) the information they need anywhere, anytime, the customer no longer believes everything they are told by a company. They talk to each other, to perfect strangers, to friends and family. They have access to reviews and product information, both good and bad, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Your success depends on the information they choose to filter out and how they filter it.

First, learn to listen to your customer. Customers you have or customers you have yet to earn, they are communicating with each other and with you right now. Use the tools of social media to find out what they are saying about you, your products, your customer service levels, and everything else related to your brand. Don’t defend or excuse while you listen. At first, just take notes, pay attention, absorb the good and the bad.

Once you have a feel for your brand perception, you have a better idea of how to enhance the positive and embrace the negative. That’s right – embrace the negative. Instead of worrying about how to control what people are saying about your brand, use the negative feedback as a way to address problems. Fuel your growth by letting go of control and harnessing the power of people as the new ROI.

Everything The Goes Around, Comes Around

In order to get involvement, engagement, interaction, innovation, conversation, community, feedback, and the other benefits of the new ROI, including indirect revenue, you must give back to the community you are building online. People don’t exist in a vacuum. Give back more than you plan to take. Be accessible. Listen, and when you speak, offer value. Let your customers become personally involved with your brand and reap the benefits of human capital as ROI.

Social media users reject outright being sold to online. To think you can make a FaceBook account or start using Twitter solely for the purpose of trying to direct sell or spam your customers would be a mistake. A better use of your social media time is to find out how to give your customers what they need and want by interacting with them. Toss your ideas out and get real time feedback. Ask for their ideas, and listen.

The new ROI is reshaping what it means to do business. Companies that don’t innovate will be left behind in this new economy. I’ll be talking in more detail about tapping and measuring the new ROI at Jeff Pulver’s Social Media Jungle on November 13th in Melville, NY. Check back next week – I’ll be posting the full details of the discussion as well as my slide deck and links to any footage of the event.