In our last post we discussed at some depth the current problem with Facebook Pages.
At present, Facebook Pages fall under two categories:
- Pages for legitimate businesses, celebrities, artists, organisations and products
- Pages for activities and objects people are “fans” of
The first is the reason Pages were created, and allows groups and organizations to keep in contact with their fans through publishing events, news, notes and interacting through their fans with comments.
The second is proving more popular to Facebook users as they wish to display their love of activities like “walking on the beach” and “steamy sex” as well as generic products like “chocolate”. These activities and generic products have no legitimate need to contact their fans, leading to the underbelly of spam and advertising we discussing in our previous post.
This leads us to an area of Facebook profiles that seems to be receiving little attention from Facebook these days: the Info tab. The Info tab contains an area for “Activities” and “Interests” – what a fantastic coincidence! This provides users of the site with a way to display these activities and interests without receiving the spam.
We think Facebook should take a simple two step approach to fixing the problem.
- Ban outright generic products and activities from pages
- Increase the publicity of “Interests” and “Activities” on Facebook profiles with a ‘Me Too’ function
The ‘Me Too’ function would allow users to easily add activities and interests to the Info tab of their profile.At the end of the day, this would increase the quality and exposure of legitimate Pages for businesses and other interest groups, as well as better exposing users’ interests on their profiles.
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