What Facebook Fans REALLY Mean To Businesses

“In the future, everyone will have their own Facebook Fan Page,” said me, to myself, sarcastically–just now.

Facebook Fan pages are great for one-way communication, advertising and providing a home for your business inside the walled garden of Facebook. We start with Aol keywords, evolved to vowel-less URLs and are now moving toward–pages only accessible by people already inside the walled garden?

Isn’t this what we made fun of Aol for doing? Not really.

Facebook’s demographics information allows for highly targeted campaigns that, when compared to a typical PPC campaign, seem to better reach the people most businesses covet. But there is a major caveat.

According to Roost, most fans of small businesses on their Facebook Pages are not local. Let me repeat that. Most fans of small business Facebook Pages are not local and therefore unlikely to buy. That could be a problem, but not a disaster.

Nestle knows disaster. While there is certainly nothing they can do to erase the baby formula disaster, ignoring it is an even worse option. Many companies would see this as a failure and strengthen their resolve to stay away from Facebook Pages altogether, but we prefer to look at it differently.

Facebook Pages are a way to humanize companies and connect with customers in real time to talk about real issues that CAN be resolved as long as they are addressed. But don’t just stick a logo on a page, feed it some automatic blog updates and ignore what happens. That will likely only solidify the perception that your company is only using social media for advertising, which doesn’t bode well for long-term engagement.

Even after a mistake, all is not lost. Kenneth Cole’s tweet about Cairo certainly caused a stir on Twitter, but it’s hard to answer all the inquiries when they are flying past. But a Facebook Page and its threaded comments can be a godsend when keeping track of apologies, comments and arguments.

Where’s your Facebook Fan page?