There has been nearly no coverage of Facebook‘s new business pages feature.
Inside Facebook reported on the feature in early November, but I hadn’t heard a peep about it until a colleague stumbled upon the business pages feature yesterday.
Facebook, wisely, requires its users to represent themselves honestly when they open an account by using your real name, which then becomes your account name, which you cannot change after the fact. Because the accounts are based on individuals, it makes it virtually impossible for an organization to have an individual page without lying about it and thus violating Facebook’s terms of use and, more importantly, the spirit of the community.
The problem I’ve been struggling with is that if I wanted to create a Facebook Group for a client, for administrative purposes at the very least, that Group had to be attached to an individual’s account because that’s the only way you can create a group.
So who, then, within a given organization, controls the Facebook account that created the group? The only real choice is the owner and/or CEO or Executive Director of the organization because they would be the least likely to move on to another job, thus avoiding ownership/access issues.
Happily, Facebook’s business pages obviates that issue.
I’m testing out the service now with an e-Strategy page I just created.
At set up, Facebook offers you an array of choices for organization type (business, nonprofit, government, etc), brand or product pages, or even band, artist, and writer pages, for precise categorization.
The pages themselves have much the same functionality and features as an individual’s pages, including the ability to plug in an RSS feed to automatically populate your Notes section with blog posts.
Facebook Business Pages Search Optimization
Business pages also are viewable outside Facebook’s walled content garden, so a limited version of the page is viewable without having to log in to Facebook. The limited pages include a logo, a listing of "fans," a link, your description, and Wall postings.
That makes Facebook business pages also search engine readable, so expect more Facebook links to begin appearing in search engine results.
The ability to search engine optimize business pages is limited to including the account name within the HTML Title tags, external links to web site(s), and the Company Overview, Mission, and Product text boxes.
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