Likes UP: Subscribers vs. Fans on Facebook

It’s a personal choice, and we must keep in mind that outright commerce on personal profiles (Timelines) is disallowed. But talking about your business, showcasing your business (a bit) on your cover image, sharing links about your business, etc. is surely okay. (Selling banner ads, selling status updates, or having a profile in the name of a business would all be violations of Facebook’s Terms of Service). – Mari Smith

5 Reasons Facebook Is Changing Completely And How To Make The Most Of It

Excellent post by Leo Widrich cofounder of Bufferapp.

source Buffer App Blog

1.) Posts from subscriptions clearly favored over Fan Pages

“People like to engage with faces, not logos.” That’s a marketing sentence as old as I am probably. And it is more true than anything when it comes to Facebook. Not only Mari Smith or Pat Flynn have observed much less engagement on their Facebook updates.

The fact that Facebook clearly favors posts from friends and subscriptions versus Fan Pages is a big wakeup call I believe. Personally, since I have started to work on getting subscribers, engagement on my posts has gone up significantly.

And not only on Facebook. I could see that traffic to my personal blog and for any other blogposts I have published as links on Facebook has gone up too.

2.) Facebook Timeline – start telling your story

Surprisingly, not all too many people have turned on the new Facebook timeline yet.

Yes, it’s all about stories. Stories are what trigger engagement. Stories are what make people clicks like, comment and share. And Facebook is betting big on it.

There are a few simple tips I would look out for when switching on timeline, so it is optimized for more new subscribers and easy browsing:

Pick an interesting cover picture, that is friendly and represents you well.
There are 4 boxes you can decide to be shown: I would go for Friends, Photos, Map, Subscribers
You can change these with the dropdown menu on the left and pick any other things you want to show. I believe these 4 have the best impact as they allow others to get a quick overview over what you are up to.
Check your “info” section on the left, it might need some updating. This is another chance to make others feel comfortable reading about you, as they know who you are.

(See previous article on Facebook Timeline here)

3.) Facebook subscribe button

The Facebook subscribe button works very similar to the Twitter follow button and is extremely powerful I believe.

The results I have seen from putting it on my own personal blog have been fabulous. It can give you a huge boost in new subscribers and even just a few dozen, already made a huge difference.

Have you tried placing the Facebook subscribe Button on your blog yet? You can get your own easily from here.

Top tip: After testing the subscribe button on my own blog, I found that if you have “show pictures” turned on, new subscribers would increase a lot faster.

4.) Facebook commenting system

Here is an interesting one I am yet to test out for myself. The Facebook commenting system has been out for about 1 year now, yet Disqus and Livefyre are the ruling commenting systems still.

In theory the FB’s commenting system could solve a lot of problems. Starting with spam, trolling and simply knowing who you are talking. It is also a big win for traffic to your blogposts. The “also post to Facebook” box is ticked by default and can help you get a lot more engagement very easily.

Whilst this seems very promising, there aren’t too many blogs around that have itinstalled. Personally I think this might change and I am tempted to test it out myself for our blog.

It may just be that the power of the profile and subscribe button needs some more time to be established, before the FB commenting system makes more sense.

5.) That little box on the top right

Yes, I wasn’t quite sure how to call it. The box on the top right, where I used to see friend suggestion has been replaced with subscribe suggestions. At first this seems quite harmless, yet I believe it is incredibly powerful.

You now have the chance to be a suggestion for other users to subscribe to. That’s huge. It is no longer friend suggestions, which were limited to people that were connected with you. It can be anyone. This new openness from Facebook is something a lot will still have to get used to. And I believe over time this will gradually make more and more sense.

The interesting part is, it only takes a few hundred subscribers to make the list, that can potentially expose you to thousands of new people to follow your status updates

It is free advertising for you and your brand and your thoughts. It’s something that trumps a fan page on top of everything else again.

Are you ready to focus on subscribers instead of fans?

Yes, you are right, for a lot of people that is hard pill to swallow. Many have built their fan base to thousands of people and now they shouldn’t focus on them anymore?

But hey, this is great! It is a new opportunity for all of us. Most will start at zero, which is tough at the to begin with, but since it is all at the very start, it can become one of your most powerful establishments on the web.

The bigger picture of this for me, is that it is all about people and personal interaction again. Logos, brands and company names are put in the second place.

Are you ready to get Facebook subscribers and dumb trying to get more fans? Or will this pass and fans will stay relevant?

COMMENTS:

=> I agree that the new Timeline gives many of us a nice opportunity to do a little marketing but everyone needs to remember that personal profiles (Timelines) are for real people and fan pages are for businesses. Also, it’s a clear TOS violation to have more than one personal profile so for people who use their Timeline for keeping up with real friends and family, using it for business would be a bad idea and since you can’t have a second personal profile, the only option left is a fan page. ~ Hugh Briss, MVP

=> I think you need to be careful throwing everything into one bucket. Meaning, not all pages are created the same. I think the above is primarily speaking to B2B pages, not B2C. We are still getting big engagement numbers on our client pages. It is about building the right audience and proper page management. Both are keys to showing up and success on FB. ~B.J. Shell

=> Facebook doesn’t want us using profiles for business. Use fanpages. Only peeps may not see your posts if they don’t engage. (Some of my demographics just don’t use our fanpages that way) Subscribe on our personal profile works better. Which we shouldn’t use for business. SPAM my Mom with client content. Huh? This all headed towards “pay us for advertising”. Unless fanpages will be getting the subscribe button.
I see Google + and the associated SEO benefits forming a larger part of my efforts this year. ~Michael Stack

=> I still stick with Pages for Business and Subscribe button is just only good for People with power and reputation like actress . and not good for beginner . I hope this is wrong . My page still get a lot of engagement , and i update it regularly . I hope FB will thinks about it. -Michael Sugiarto

=> I’m sticking with two separate channels for sure. I like the ability to keep business and personal totally separate if I wish… I like to experiment with some of my more spiritual/universal topics on my personal profile and I couldn’t really do that on my fan page. My fan page has come to be known as a place to find help with Facebook which is great. I do notice on my personal profile (Timeline) that I get a very different type of response when I post to public, vs. friends only (over 4700!) on my profile and vs. on my fan page. Interestingly enough, I rarely get spam or inappropriate comments on my fan page (or when posting to friends, of course!). But I have seen an uptick in strange comments on my Timeline public posts… which requires a tad more monitoring!! 🙂 ~Mari Smith