Here are the Cliffs Notes on Community Pages: for quite awhile, anyone was able to throw together a Facebook Page and foster ridiculous numbers of followers (called “fans”) in a short amount of time, thanks to 400+ million Facebook users, and good old viral-ness. Many of these pages were associated with brand names and trademarks not belonging to the page owner. This pissed off a lot of companies who wanted a strong presence on Facebook, but were thwarted by the numerous Facebook Pages that already existed for their brand. Hence, Facebook came up with the idea to turn those lay-person owned Facebook Pages into a new concept called Community Pages, which doesn’t appear to have much repercussion, until you look under the hood…

What Community Page Conversion Means for Your Facebook Page

Regardless if your page has anything to do with a brand (i.e., Coca Cola, McDonalds, etc) or not – it’s now subject to being found by Facebook and converted into a Community Page. What this does is it differentiates your page from an official corporate-owned page. It doesn’t appear to look like anything visual has happened with the Facebook Page. You’re still the admin and can edit it. It still has the “vanity URL” (facebook.com/mypage), and nothing else has been edited to the look and feel of the page. However, once you cross a certain undefined threshold – for instance, a million fans – the page gets ripped from your clutches and released to the community, where it will be treated like a Wikipedia page for all to edit. You lose — good day sir. (Kudos if you got that movie reference).

What’s really unfair here is the prospect of losing your baby, even if you did nothing to upset the corporate gods and their trademarks. So, your “I like picking my nose and sticking it on a basketball” page might become community-run if it becomes too popular. Why? It really makes no sense. The TOS for Facebook Pages say that they’re supposed to represent a brand, company, famous person or similar, but Facebook Page culture has shown it to evolve into a modern day meme, where pages represent the old “did you ever notice…” humor that many people can’t resist becoming a fan of.

By the way, the word “fan” has been ax’ed for the word “like.” So, you’re not getting “fans” to your Facebook [Community] Page anymore, you’re getting “likes.”

What a Facebook Community Page Looks Like

You might have already seen a Facebook Community Page without even knowing it: ever since Facebook made a major update to segregate your profile’s “Likes and Interests” sections into categories like “activities,” “interests,” “music,” “books,” and so forth, many of the generic Facebook Pages you once fanned have now become Facebook Community Pages. A few examples are “small business owner,”  “80s” and “cigars.” Notice how all of these pages have a permanent fixture at the top of the page:

Our goal is to make this Community Page the best collection of shared knowledge on this topic. If you have a passion for Cigars, sign up and we’ll let you know when we’re ready for your help. You can also get us started by suggesting the Official Facebook Page.

Do you think the original people who created and maintained these generic pages for years have gotten pissed at the fact that those pages are now public hubs, controlled by Facebook? Yeah, super pissed is my guess.

Protesting Your Facebook Page’s Conversion

If you feel that your page was unjustly targeted, you can protest the change to a Community Page, but it all comes down to having to state your Page’s business credentials, as you can see.

This is only good news for big corporations, looking to secure their vanity URLs and identity online. I can’t really talk that situation down, as I’ve worked in the corporate world to get back cybersquatted vanity URLs, and I own one for my own business. I also openly hate socialsquatters, which I’ve talked about many times before.

With your new knowledge of the Facebook Community Page fiasco scenario, know that your casual viral campaign days may come to an end, and put more of your attention on official business-related Facebook Pages. That’s where the security’s at. Also, if someone pilfered your Facebook vanity URL, it’s never been a better time to wrestle it back!

Facebook Pages are seen two entirely different ways in the eye of the beholder. A regular Facebook user sees the stupid title, think “yeah! I totally get it – LOL!” and clicks “Fan this page” immediately:

Then, there’s the internet marketer who looks at how ridiculous this behavior is, and nearly falls over backward when they see astronomical numbers of fans:

That’s when it hits you: could this be the early stages of something big that is yet to come? What kind of value do these dumb Facebook Pages have to big businesses? Before you say “no value,” think about this: a page that caters to a niche market and has hundreds of thousands (or over a million) niche-interested followers. That’s like one ginormous email blast list that would have otherwise cost a fortune. Don’t think that can be harnessed for corporate reasons? Think again.

The Psychology of Facebook Pages

I’ve written about the difference of Facebook Pages vs. Facebook Groups, and Pages always come up on top. People fan them, and they get more internal promotion on Facebook. They tend to go viral. Most people will not join a group unless they want to contribute to it, and even if they did – the chances that they’ll ever return are pretty slim. At least Page updates will show up in their news feed. Groups won’t.

With social networking, you want to engage your Page. In essence, you DO generate your own little world/email list/audience, but you DON’T want to annoy them. Pages that update too often are annoying, because it pushes everyone’s news feed down yet another slot. You might not see how bad that is, but tell that to someone who only cares about what their high school buddies are up to, or for when that next Farmville friend reward will show up. Don’t even try to spam affiliate links on a Facebook Page – FB has been keen to insta-banning pages that have done this.

The bottom line is that you want to be less annoying so that you can keep retention as high as possible. Some of these Pages never even had a single update – they got popular just because people connected with the title, alone!

As for Pages going viral – you never know what can set it off. All you have to do is have a few key people fan the page, and have their friends see the notification of that action on their own news feeds, prompting them to smile at your stupid Facebook Page title and fan it themselves, and so on. It’s fun to add yourself to something that further defines or describes your persona, and to connect with others who totally agree with those dumb little things in life that we never pay much attention to.

Future Implications of High-Volume Facebook Pages

Is there any value in Pages about “flipping the pillow over to the cold side?” Not to you, personally…but how about to Bed Bath and Beyond? Or to someone who knits pillowcases as a side job? Maybe. This, to me, is uncharted territory.

These pages have accomplished what so many Fortune 500′s have not: rendered hundreds of thousands of followers with no effort. No marketing, no ad dollars spent, nothing at all. All they had to do to achieve it was to use the KISS mentality (Keep It Simple, Stupid). Think Seinfeld, and “did you ever notice…” – the dumb things that annoy you, amuse you or make you happy throughout your day, and make a page out of them if it hasn’t already been done.

With some viral magic and timing, could you be holding on to a heavily fanned Facebook Page that could prove to be valid e-real estate to some company at some point in the future?

Forums (it all should start here!)

Forums reside on your website, and are always run by the community. It’s a contact point for visitors between you (or your company) and the rest of your community. They make the content, they post the questions, answers, and participate in debates. All you have to do is moderate all of this stuff, be the “cornerstone,” be helpful, and keep it a democracy (gee, that’s it?)

However, it all starts off with well-chosen sub forums. It’s up to you do first define what the purpose of your forum is, and sculpt that purpose by creating relevantly titled sub forums that people will post in. Most forums have a “General Discussion” and “Off Topic,” but it’s the stuff in between that really counts. What do you want your community to be able to talk about? What don’t you want them to talk about? These are the two questions that will help you decide what sub forums to create.

Twitter (relationship marketing)

Twitter is pretty much run by you, and is a contact point between the visitors and you. There isn’t much of a “community” on Twitter per-se, since messages are sent directly to you (others can see them, though).

Twitter is a relationship maintenance tool that lets your audience know that you’re alive and out there, constantly adding great new features to your business, listening to their suggestions, and responding to their questions. It’s not a great place to “poll the audience,” but rather, let them know what’s new, and what’s going on with the company. Announce events and new features here, as well as helpful tips and tricks related to your industry or business.

Facebook Pages (the online cork board)

Facebook Pages are run by you, and they’re all about you. There is community interaction, but for the most part, the page is what YOU make of it (otherwise, create a Facebook Group instead). Here, you post a mix of the following things: company updates, new features, limited time offers/coupons, polls (“how many of you like…”, “what do you think about…”, “have you ever…”, etc.), and fun/offbeat/off-topic things that relate to your industry (cartoons, YouTube videos, jokes).

Note that I never mentioned “sales,” “affiliate links” or “pull tactics” for any of the three? These are community tools, not sales tools. Let them make the decision as to whether they should buy your stuff or not. Your website links are easy enough for them to find. This is all about being “one of the guys” and showing that you’re not a corporate asshole. Converse with the locals — they just might make you be cool like one of them!

The other main point is that your website forums, Twitter account and Facebook Page should have a distinct and individual purpose. Don’t mimic your Twitter and Facebook with each other, it defeats the purpose of anyone joining both. Make one serve one purpose, and the other serve another purpose…but make those purposes meaningful! Define your goals ahead of time.

Know which demographic uses which service. If teens are using Facebook, have one strategy for them. If parents are using Twitter, make your Twitter account parent-relevant.

It’s not as hard as it looks once you’ve gotten your objective, strategty and tactics written down on paper!

Some things to think about – why do you have to be on Twitter? What value does it add to your company or business in general? (please don’t say “for the sake of being there, ’cause everyone else is on it,” which will prompt a swift kick in the ass from any proper internet marketer). Know that Twitter is not a sales tool, it’s a relationship building tool, and a way to let people know of a face behind the company or service. It lets people know that you’re doing something, instead of sitting back and collecting revenue. When people get to know you, they trust you – hence, they promote you. If you’re throwing in affiliate links and other worthless garbage, you’ll lose your reader base faster than the split second it takes for me to close one of those mile-long one page sales websites.

On the topic of Facebook Pages, I’ve seen some *really* shitty ones in my day, and they’re usually created by the “how do I get high page rank?” crowd. Facebook Pages, like Twitter accounts or anything else that goes public to the internet community, will require constant effort on your part. Post something of substance. The instant you start being self promotional is the instant people will lose faith in you and your ability to be “one of the crowd.” Make your Facebook Page be all about other people’s opinions. Post something, ask them for their feelings or opinions, and participate. Do something fun or interesting – post a funny video related to your business, or branch off a new thread about a discussion that had just been started to get some more visitor participation. Do this every couple days. If you let a Facebook Page sit stagnant, nobody will want to “fan” it…especially when the post at the very top of the page has been sitting there since 2008.

The moral of this rant is that social networking has the word “work” in it. It’s not a ‘set it and forget it’ solution – have a full plan of action written down that specifies your objective (why am I doing this?), strategy (how will I initiate it?) and tactics (what tools and methods will I use?). Don’t be one of those dummies who create social networks for the sake of “being there,” or to obtain yet another worthless backlink from a blank page. Make something special out of it, and you’ll be greatly rewarded for reaching out to your audience and letting them know that you can effectively use 21st century tools :)