One of the main things you couldn’t do before on Facebook was to have a profile for your band. Basically, the profile had to have a real name of a real person. Any profile that didn’t follow this was bound to have thier profile suspended and I’ve known many people and organizations whom have lost their profiles because they were running it under a different entity.
The make-shift solution for this for awhile was starting up a Facebook group which allowed people to congregate in a central location. It seemed like an ideal solution, but as I’ve noticed, with the onslaught of silly groups out there, people tend to get fickle about which ones they would join and which ones they wouldn’t. Besides if there wasn’t an active community behind the group, it wasn’t something people would visit on a regular basis.
Recently on the Facebook Blog they announced Facebook Ads, which include building your own free profile pages for brands, companies and personalities. I decided I would try it out and built a page for Rannie Turingan Photography. After doing so I also decided to shut down my “I’ve been Shot by a Photojunkie” Group page.
Now people have asked me, why I would switch. here are a couple of key points that made me want to.
Groups are great when there is an active community. My facebook group was a great place for people to gather, but they aren’t looking for interaction with each other. They were looking for interaction with me.
A tend to get a lot of facebook friend requests from readers of my site and fans of my work. many whom I have never met or hardly know. Having this “Public Figure” profile on facebook allows me the ability to have people add me with adding me directly to my personl facebook profile.
If I ever want to run “Social Ads” on facebook. It’s one click away to setting that up.
I know I am a member of several facebook groups for artists and other personalities. I personally hope that they all take the leap and start up a Public Figure page.
What are your thoughts here? Really is it much different than how Myspace has user pages and Artist pages? Pretty similiar.
I just made a similar switch. So far I think some of the people who were in the group might be a little slow to switch over to the page.
I think it would have been nice to be able to convert a group over to a page, but didn’t see any way of doing that.
I think it is very similar to MySpace, except that it is quite a bit cleaner design, and adds the targeted ad campaign feature.
I also like how they’ve included a basic stats package with each page as well.