The Blog

Recently we have been putting more and more effort into our Facebook Fan Page. I never realized its full potential until we got the vanity URL.

Let's look at the advantages of a Fan Page:

• It's easy to interact with your fans on relevant content
• The audience is broader than Twitter
• You can post updates
• You can post videos
• You can post pictures
• You can post links
• You aren't limited to 140 characters
• You can have a cool URL (just like twitter)

Most of the items above are pretty much what you get on twitter. But I am slowly beginning to think that Twitter and the Fan Pages are not really comparable. I believe that they are two different tools which serve similar (but not) purposes.

It's tough to compare the two

It still baffles me that you can begin to compare Facebook with Twitter. Personally I use twitter more, but mostly because of desktop App's like tweetdeck. I'm sure that if we put in the effort we would be able to interact just as much or more on the Fan Pages.

Facebook has 250 million users. Twitter has 40 million. The potential for your audience on Facebook is clearly much bigger and in a way it's easier to find your target (Facebook Ad's offer you the best way to target your audience. We have used them before… they work).

The Fan Page allows you to add your own apps. We plan on creating a ‘box' on our page which can list our latest shows and their comments. On top of custom boxes you can also use the discussion board (which we are way under utilizing), this can allow you to get closer to your fan base without having to create custom forums. As Mr. Vaynerchuk says ‘Get into the trenches bitches', what better place to do it besides your blog?

On top of that you won't be criticized for punting your own company because after all it is your company page but with the personal touch.

All your information can be centralized on your FB page. You don't need to direct everyone to Flickr, Twitpic, twitvid (whatever its called) etc. just to share a picture. You can post it in your FB gallery and boom, its there for all to see.

You can also get more feedback with your FB page, there is the cool ‘like' button which allows fans to vote on your posts. There is a huge amount of power in that.

So what do I propose?

Continue using Twitter to market and interact, it's too powerful a place to ignore, there is nothing better than getting re-tweeted 100's of times. However don't ignore the power of the Fan Page.

With Fan Pages you can get closer to your users, you can have conversations without flooding the tweet stream and you can centralize all your content on a potentially massive network.

Oh, and there are less spam bots on Facebook ;)

By the way, you can become a fan of ours on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/fromthecouch