Facebook is no stranger to negative feedback. Nearly every advancing step of Facebook’s social platform has been met with an equal push back from users. The most recent batch of changes, announced at the Facebook Developer’s conference last month, have been no exception. They’ve incited backlash from both users and the media, and raised serious concerns from the ever-growing segment of corporate brands with a presence on the site.
Brands have historically fought back against Facebook for control over their official pages, but the recent changes have created more unease and confusion than ever. This is because with the introduction of the Open Graph and “Like” system of sharing user interest, also came the quiet launch of Community Pages.
Community Pages are unofficial and can be created by any user, but are not managed or moderated by a specific entity. Instead, these pages serve as hubs for information and status updates pertaining to one topic.
Aggregated content from Wikipedia and a stream of public user comments make community pages a cheap way for Facebook to extend content offerings. This strategy works well for broad topics like “cooking” or “hiking” but gets muddled when it comes to pages associated with brands or products, like “Coca-Cola” or “Starbucks Frappucino.”
Why Brands Should Be Worried
Currently, Facebook allows multiple iterations of the same brand name to appear as a Community Page, creating redundancy and ultimately diluting a brand’s official presence. Also, brands cannot control the appearance of logos and trademarks on these pages, possibly making it difficult for users to differentiate official brand pages from unofficial Community Pages.
In fact, many aspects of Community Pages widen the gap of control between brands and content. In Jeremiah Owyangs article entitled, How Facebook’s ‘Community Pages’ and Privacy Changes Impact Brands, he notes, “Community Pages only aggregate content (some which is out of context) and do not allow for two way dialog in the form of comments. Brands that have incorrect content on Community pages, or brand detractors are not able to respond directly.”
In addition, Facebook has made a subtle note that if a Community Page “becomes very popular (attracting thousands of fans), it will be adopted and maintained by the Facebook community.” It is difficult to say at what point this will occur, how users will react, and just how this will impact brands.
Finally, there’s the ultimate danger of Community Pages gaining popularity to a point where they become the primary brand presence, over their official counterparts. With no filter on streaming status updates, and open control of Wikipedia content, disgruntled customers could swarm a brand’s Community page, destroying the positive presence many brands have fought so hard to create.
