Ramble On Ron

Diamonds, Music and other Facets of Life

Facebook Changes Page Policy in 24 Hours

Posted on | May 21, 2010 | No Comments

Here’s a new one from Facebook and it is a great sign – Facebook listening to their users and actually caring about the people that make their site so great – their customers! That’s right I call them customers, not users, because we are all Facebook customers, whether we pay or not.

Yesterday, Samuelson’s Diamonds wrote a blog post about the fan page changes that Facebook made:

“… Facebook recently made a change requiring that Pages be authenticated before enabling the ability to set a landing tab beyond Wall or Info. To be eligible for authentication, a Page must have greater than 10k fans or the Page admin must work with their ads account manager…”

I thought about this change and although I understood why the change was being made, it upset me. It upset me because I have put a lot of time and money into our pages, most notably our “Diamonds” Page, which now boasts almost 350,000 fans. Not just Facebook ad money (we have spent a little) but actual jewelry prizes and a lot of TIME, which we paid our employees.  And although we have way more than 10K fans, I do not have an account manager.

On top of that, our Samuelson’s Diamonds Fan Page, for our local retail store, is hovering around 1000 fans. And, although the Diamonds Fan Page has almost 350k fans, we consider our smaller page to be of great significance to our business. We’ve invested a great deal of time and effort in building its content and appeal. Facebook’s determination that a fan count should decide how user friendly the fan page could be just seemed wrong.

How about all of the marketers, big and small, who are building fan pages for other companies? In fact, we are about to launch a new service for the jewelry industry, giving independent retailers and manufacturers the ability to create a dynamic Facebook presence for under $500.

Well not long after this change a message popped up on the developer site:

Hello,

As of last night, we’ve removed the recently-added authentication requirement for setting custom landing tabs on Pages. The requirement was instituted as part of a Pages quality initiative, and we apologize for the inconvenience this caused to our developer and business community. We are re-investigating the situation, and will not make any further changes without first giving our community standard notice and lead-time.

Thanks for all your feedback,

Matt Trainer

You can follow this topic by clicking here.

I say it’s great and thank you Facebook for taking the first step in caring about your customers.

I firmly believe that your website is still very important, but don’t forget to use your Facebook page to increase your database and talk to your customers. Both can and should work together to make your brand a stronger one.

Category: facebook, social media
Tags: > > >

Comments