A facebook fan page is a destination you can create within facebook for fans of your product or service.  Typically, you (or someone else) create the fan page, and users can join (if they are fan).  Once a user becomes a fan the activity is displayed in the news feed which shows all of your contacts that you are now a fan of someone or something.  Many fan pages also allow you to invite your friends to become fans as well.  As I’m sure you have by now deduced, a company/product facebook fan page can become quite a popular site.   Here’s a great post from John Bell regarding social network advertising that also talks a bit about facebook fan pages.

There are a lot of popular facebook fan pages, here are a few of them:

• Coca-Cola 1,515,357 fans
• Nutella 1,320,029 fans
• Pringles 992,104 fans
• Victoria’s Secret 814,132 fans

Out of the 4 that I mentioned above, it looks like the only one that was actually created by the brand/company was Victoria’s Secret.  What I find shocking and rather disappointing is that nobody is doing anything with all of these fans.  We’re talking about 1,000,000 people that are saying “hey I love your product.”  If you visit the facebook fan sites you will see that most of them are pretty basic with the focus being around discussion topics.  What I want to know is why these brand/companies aren’t engaging and interacting with their fan base, to me this is a huge missed opportunity.  Some of the facebook fan pages are a bit more active then others but the fact remains the same, these brands have a lot of fans that they are not engaging with.  The point is, it’s not enough to have fans, you have to do something to engage them.  To me, this is proof, that it’s not enough to just understand the tools out there, you have to be creative and you have to be clever.  Above all you cannot let the focus of the facebook fan page be “selling.”

Here are a few ideas I had of how brand/companies could leverage their facebook fan pages.

• provide exclusive behind the scenes content or interviews that can only be found on the fan page
• showcase the users/fans by running promotions such as creating your own video, sharing 10 things you love about the product. etc.
• offer the facebook fans special promotional or discount products
• recruit from the facebook fan page, you already know the person you are going to get is a passionate fan of your product
• create a “fan day” where all the fans change their status to “I love (product) (got this idea from Justin at Sprint thanks
• engage the community for feedback on new product ideas or promotions
• look at the discussions to see what your fans are talking about, there are thousands of people on the Victoria’s Secret fan page talking about things like “best features on another person,” or “what celebrity other people look like” or “who the hottest fan is.”  These are all free ideas that the community is coming up.  Perhaps Victoria’s Secret can run a contest on the site to pick a new model, maybe they can create a widget that compares people to celebs, etc.
• ask the community for help to spread around the news of a new product/feature

These are just a few of the things that companies can be doing with their facebook fan pages but at this point it’s pretty clear, if you do nothing, you will achieve nothing.

If you were one of the above companies how would you utilize your facebook fan page?  Have you seen any good examples of how a company is utilizing their facebook fan page?

thanks for reading!