Rant: Facebook, Where are you Going?
As Facebook becomes more ubiquitous in the English lexicon (not to mention the Italian, Russian, Chinese, and, well, you-name-it lexicon), it’s becoming increasingly frustrating to me how complex it’s becoming.
That’s right. Complex.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s still incredibly easy to sign up. It’s still easy to add applications, follow new people, build your friends list and keep people up to date on what you’re doing.
The iPhone app is great too; I love the fact that I can take a picture and post it immediately to Facebook without any fuss.
But if your are a business user just getting on to Facebook and you really want to take full advantage of its capabilities, there are an overwhelming number of choices you can tap in to. Do you set up your business as a fan page, a personal page, or a group? Can you create said group/fan page/personal page with an easy-to-remember, SEO-friendly link to that page, or do you have some obscurely long string to memorize?
And quick quiz, for those of you on Facebook. What’s the difference between the “Live Feed” and the “News Feed?” Does it drive you nuts now that the default behavior of Facebook is to show you messages that occurred…urm…20 hours ago? Maybe I’m the only one who’s annoyed by the fact that I have to click a link to see what my friends are doing now.
Then there are the Facebook apps.
Apple, Inc. recently announced they passed the 100,000 app mark in the online App store for iPhone. There’s an app for everything, and it can boggle the mind how many things the iPhone can be coaxed into doing. But, at the very least, there’s a way to search through all these apps and find the one you might need in order to make your phone function the way you want it to. On Facebook, there are two issues:
- In most cases, I don’t know why I would need an app to enhance my Facebook page.
- The vast majority of apps out there (in my experience, anyway) don’t really serve any business-related function (Mafia Wars, Bejeweled, or Farmville, anyone?).
Web 2.0 is supposed to be about simplicity.
Facebook still does something really well: it connects people in a way that they wouldn’t have been had it not been around. I still connect with people that live elsewhere in this country that I would never have found had it not been for this site. I’m able to keep up with people I don’t see every day by looking at pictures of them, their kids, their dogs, their ultrasounds, and what they had for lunch.
And that is the power we need to tap when we Facebook. We need to tap the connections. And the demographics. Unlike a LinkedIn, which I consider a more professional-to-professional network, Facebook has some great demographic information on the people that use it. And that’s great for targeted messages, like advertisements, that you want to get in front of a specific group of people.
Over the next few weeks, much like I did with Twitter, I’m going to try to delve a little deeper into the functions of Facebook that seem buried somewhere behind the scenes. We’ll see how you can apply the power to your business and build up a presence that will really help expose you to the people that need to see you and use your business.
Keep an eye out for our Facebook clinic, coming November 20th, and please attend if you can. We’ll be doing another “Small Business, Big Voices” interview set, and we’d love to include YOUR business on it.
In the meantime, please comment about how you use Facebook now, and what kind of topics you’d like to see us explore here in the near future!
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