Facebook has recently made Pages more like Profiles. I’m frighteningly behind in keeping up with all this new stuff (bad, bad!) and I’ve only now had a chance to go and peek at the revamped Pages.
I was initially really disappointed by Facebook Pages. I remember when I started working on promoting Going Solo, I first created a fan page for Going Solo on Facebook. Not many people registered as fans. A few weeks (months?) later, I created a group, and lo and behold, people joined in droves. I realised that Pages weren’t really that interesting (they were far too static) and they didn’t allow you to invite people to become fans. Groups work well because you can invite people to join them (with the side-effect that we’re all swamped with requests to join all sorts of groups).
Back to the new Pages, the fact that they’re more like profiles has led me to create my own “fan” page. Now, it’s not that I consider myself a famous person or anything, but if I look at things coldly, clearly, more people want to be in touch with me than I can keep up with. I am a bit of a public figure in certain circles.
On Twitter, I have (today) about 2300 followers, but I follow only 500 people. On Facebook, I have about 500 “friends” (see a pattern emerging) and another 200 friend requests from people I barely know, don’t know, or don’t recognize. And that is after I went “overboard” about a year ago and started exercising way less restraint in who I connected to — because there was a business incentive for me to do so.
Initially, I kept my Facebook connections way more restricted than my Twitter ones. Facebook was “people I feel I know”. But that failed.
So I’m wondering: if I use a Page to stay connected to acquaintances, networking contacts, etc… will it change the way I connect to people with my profile? Will I be able to reclaim some “privacy” for my Facebook profile?
It’s way too early to tell. But I’m looking forward to experimenting with this and seeing how it goes.
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I think you’re right to separate your personal and public content on Facebook, and the new Public Profile pages seem to work well for this – if you can get over the discomfort of inviting people to be your “fan”.
With its widespread adoption, Twitter now really offers people an appropriate way to connect widely with people they don’t know, but do share interests with. Facebook is much better suited to maintaining relations with people you are genuinely close to.