Presenting yourself on facebook
There are 3 options to represent yourself on facebook. Which one is the most suitable for you?
| Personal profile | Group | Fan page | |
| Purpose | Presenting a private person | presenting a group of people gathering together for a mutual interest, dissection, goal, hobbies etc. | An official representation of a company, a business, a nonprofit organization, a celebrity etc. |
| Limitations on the amount of friends | Up to 5000 friends | No limitation | No limitation |
| Adding friends | Friendship request, confirmation of friendship request. | People can join freely. You can offer people to join the group | People can join by clicking ‘Join’. Fans can offer their friends to join the fan page |
| Account owner exposure | The owner of the account is the represented, therefore exposure is total | The creator and the managers of the group are exposed | The account owner and the managers are NOT exposed |
| Reasons for facebook to delete account | Facebook reserves the right to erase accounts it considers to be fictitious or has other goals than representing a private person | Facebook reserves the right to close groups that do not follow the terms of use and ethics defined by facebook | Facebook reserves the right to erase a fan page when the owner of the page is not the official representative of the subject presented |
| Changing your name | You can change the account name | You can change the account name | The name cannot be changes from the minute the page is ‘open’ |
| Sponsored links | No advertising | No advertising | You can advertise on your fan page |
| Communicating with your friends | You can write on a friend’s wall, send a private email, and comment on other people’s posts or your own posts | You can post on the group wall or send a private email to all the group members (this last option is blocked once you reach 5000 group members), you can also comment on the group members’ posts.
All the interactions will appear under your personal user name |
Posts by the page owner will appear automatically on the fans’ homepages. You can send updates. You can comment on the posts on the fan page but will not be able to comments on other pages\ profiles\ walls. |
| SEO (search engine optimization) | No SEO | No SEO | Can be SEO’d |
| Applications | You can add applications to the profile | You cannot add applications to the group page | You can add customized applications to the fan page |
| Advanced options | It is possible to connect the profile to external pages which will send updates to your profile automatically | No applications available | Use of FBML
It is possible to connect the profile to external pages which will send updates to the fan page automatically |
| Which one do I choose | For private people who like to contact on a personal level surf facebook and interact with other facebook users | For small groups (up to 5000 members) which share a common interest. | Organizations, companies, businesses, brands celebrities, public personalities etc. aiming to have a representation in the web and the ability to communicate with a large number of people |
Getting to know your homepage
After you sign up on facebook and choose the best option for you, get to know your homepage. This is the page seen by every facebook user as soon as he enters his or her account. The page changes from user to use and is composed of the content that the specific user choose to see when becoming a friend of another user or a fan on a fan page.
Which content do I see?
Fan page content: will present the content posted by the fan page which was joined according to preference which I will introduce in the next section.
Friends’ content: content posted by friends, as well as content created by facebook regarding friends’ activities (John is now friend with Jenny, Merry joined the X fan page, 5 friends commented on post X).
From now and then facebook makes changes to the user interface, therefore the kind and content may vary.
In addition to content, you also have access to the most common tools on facebook (my inbox, my events, photos, my applications, my fan pages, my campaigns, my favorite applications…)
Content presentation preferences
There are 2 options for content presentation on your homepage:
- Top news
Using ‘Top news’ you will see the content that facebook algorithm decided will interest you the most. Some of the criteria according to which this algorithm chooses for you are:
- Post quality – measured by the number of the interactions in the page.
- The number of interactions with the specific piece of content (high number means that this is an interesting piece of content)
- The number of interactions our friends had with this piece of content
- Our own history with the page / friend that posted the piece of content. How often do we visit this fan page or friend’s page, and do we have any interactions with him (comment on posts, ‘like’)
- How many of our friends are connected to the page in question
- Most recent
This is an attempt to mimic the micro blogging service ‘Twitter’. It will show all the posts posted by our friends and the posts on the fan pages we joined in real – time.
Getting to know your wall
Much like the homepage, every user has his or her unique ‘wall’. My wall shows all my recent activities in facebook which can be presented and will include links.
For example, when I click ‘like’ on a picture from a fan page I joined the line “X likes the picture in page Y”. The word ‘picture’ will be a link to the picture and the page name will be a link to the page. Meaning that when a user clicks ‘like’ on a piece of content you post, you get free publicity on his homepage. This is a most important publicity, since studies show that the most common way for people to be exposed to a new content on facebook is by wandering around to see what’s on their friends’ walls. (think about it: go back and consider the implication of ‘Top news’ as a viral marketing option…)
In addition, from your wall one can see the list of your friends, basic information about you and also have access to other tubs on your account (if you choose to share them) such as info, photos, video, and other tubs you choose to add
now this I couldn`t resist showing you all … (click the link to see how would life be if facebook was real)
The credit for this post goes to Yorai Ronen.
Questions, comments, requests and whatever’s on your mind – Feel free to contact me,
Tags: changing your name, content, facebook, facebook fan page, fan, Group, number, page purpose, profile group, request confirmation, SEO, Social Media
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