Facebook Rethinks How it Defines Page Relationships

Facebook has changed the box that displays the Pages that a user has joined from being labeled “Andrew is a Fan of” to the more general “Andrew’s Pages,” a change that will improve potential success of most Facebook Pages.

Since many users join Pages and Groups as a form of self-identification, the nomenclature that Facebook had used had limited the Page’s potential reach as a communication tool (yet another example of how much impact well or poorly copy can have on the user experience). For example, Vampire Weekend’s Facebook Page has 9156 fans, but only 249 wall posts, 132 discussion posts, 20 fan photos and 3 fan videos with the majority of those contributions coming from a small group of active fans. Assuming that the 8700 or so members who haven’t contributed have not joined for the band’s updates, it is safe to say that most of the members have joined the Page as a way of constructing their online identity/profile and signaling to their peers.

While this dynamic may serve to inflate Page numbers in some cases, it can be detrimental in others where the focus of a Page does not lend itself to users identifying themselves as fans. For example, if I were a high school administrator, it may be a good idea to consider creating a Page for my school, allowing me to effectively disseminate important information and get important feedback from the students and faculty while boosting the profile of the school. However, under the old fan definition, how many surly, image conscious teens would be willing to stamp on their profile that they are a fan of their high school?

This dynamic is the reason that Facebook changed the definition and by doing so effectively eliminating the only advantage that Groups had over Pages for marketers (I am expecting the Groups application to slowly die out or be merged with Pages). While this more general definition is a step in the right direction, why not allow the user to define their relationship with a Page or Group by selecting between a few categories (fan, advocate, hater, friend, coworker)? This would benefit the marketers that the Pages application was built for by providing them with more granular data on their product or brand’s status while enabling the users to more accurately self-identify.