Yesterday Facebook launched “community pages”.
Users can “generate support for their favorite cause or topic by creating a Community Page. If it becomes very popular (attracting thousands of fans), it will be adopted and maintained by the Facebook community.”
Obviously it is clear that if you want to create an “I love pizza” page, now you should create a “community” page. However this is completely irrelevant, since all people care about are “brand related” pages.
Here is a very good explanation: “community pages allow the owner of a brand to control a page for that brand, while letting Facebook users create their own separate pages around the brand. For example, a pickle maker can have its own page for the pickles, but fans can create a community page not controlled by the manufacturer.”
I think it is a great idea.
Pages are “better” than groups (to promote a brand) because they allow the page administrator to post messages to the fans’ walls. However pages are only supposed to be administered by the official representative of the brand-person-movement the page has been named for.
So we have the problem of the (tons of) “non official” pages (ie the pages set up and administered by fans).
Until today these “non-official” brand pages did not work.
First of all they were “not official”, so Facebook would need to turn them to the brand.
Secondly they were lame, because the administrator/founder often did not have the time/content/interest to animate them properly (or worse they used the page to promote something that had nothing to do with the objective of the page).
But the fact is that “spontaneous (ie non brand controlled) fan clubs” is a concept that makes a lot of sense. If properly executed, it could make more sense than the idea of a “brand controlled fan page”.
Question: say you love brand X that is produced by company Y. There are two fan pages for brand X, with same number of fans, and equally engaging content. An official fan page, with one million users, controlled by company Y, and a “spontaneous” fan page, controlled by the community. Which one do you choose to fan?
The trick is in the “equally engaging content” condition. That will be easier to achieve if the page is “maintained” by the community, not by the “anybody” that for some reason loved the product and had the idea of setting up the fan page.
I am very curious of the “community maintenance” mechanism Facebook will come up with, as I am curious to find out if admins of “spontaneous” fan pages can give them up and “transform” them into “community” fan pages – in that case they would become the “safe haven” of “spontaneous fan pages”.
And a potential headache (or more likely a bonanza, who knows) for marketers.
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