The Only Useful Thing On Facebook You Can Use Right Now

Since Facebook’s rise to popularity I’ve essentially been anti-Facebook because I considered the system not only a complete waste of time and energy, but 100% useless. In fact, the only reason I have an account there is because some people only communicate on the internet through that site and nowhere else.

On a whim, I decided to try a part of the system just for the "Why not?" factor, that being fan pages. I play music as a hobby on the side, have some YouTube videos of me playing my stuff and wanted to have a place where people could communicate with me. Facebook is #1, so there was nothing to lose.

What I discovered about Facebook fan pages was nothing short of incredible. I will list out the benefits first and then tell you how you use use them right now.

1. You do not have to give away your life story by using a fan page.

Privacy-aware folk (of which I am) can’t stand Facebook because its privacy policies are horrible. When you add friends into the system they simply know too much about you all at once – but not with fan pages. When someone joins your fan page, they only see what you want them to see and have far greater control over what’s going on.

2. Joining a fan page literally takes only one click.

All someone has to do is click a ‘like’ button and they can start participating.

3. You can have your fan page as open or as exclusive as you want.

Put in basic terms, your page can be 100% privatized with approved-by-you-membership-only, 100% open or anywhere in between that.

4. Fan pages are built for easy communication with minimal fuss.

While Facebook in itself can be a nightmare to use, fan pages aren’t. They are arguably the simplest part of the site, both for you the administrator and the users of your page.

5. You are allowed as many fan pages as you want.

It’s very fortunate that Facebook users are not limited to a single fan page as you can administer as many as you wish.

How is this useful to you?

This is the best part.

Have you ever wanted a simple message board where it was easy to administer membership, easy to administer moderators/admins and have the users be able to post and share things like photos, videos, links and so on? Facebook fan pages is it.

You can use a fan page to post anything, and there is also "Notes" for a small blog and "Events" for event posting to keep people up-to-date on the happenings of the page.

Fan pages are perfectly suited for club and team activities. They are also perfectly suited if you have a business and want to offer an easy form of technical support message-board style.

In other words, fan pages are actually usable. This is not the same "what did you have for lunch" style junk of normal status posts.

Think of it this way: If you’ve ever tried a forum, message board, Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups or any other type of collaborative messaging platform and found it difficult or just plain horrible to use, the Facebook fan page is a huge breath of fresh air. This is the ticket you were looking for.

Quick guide to setting up and using a Facebook fan page

If you don’t already have a Facebook account, get one.

Create your new page here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

Using tabs

• Wall: This is where people post general status updates.
• Info: A description of the page (by you) and what it’s about.
• Photos: Any photos posted to the page go here.
• Discussions: This is an extended forum-style section where you or others can start topics and have threaded messaging.
• Video: Any video posted to the page goes here.
• Links: And outbound links to other web sites will be here.
• Notes: This is a mini-blog. If you need to post something with some good length to it, it would go here.
• Events: If you have upcoming events that land on specific dates, they go there.

How to get quick access to your page?

Whenever you login to your Facebook account, go to Account / Manage Pages, like this:

A box will appear showing all the pages you currently have, even if just one, and you can click through to go there.

How do you get a link to your fan page?

After clicking through to your page, the link is in your address bar:

Copy this link and send in email or instant message. If you want a shorter URL, use the bit.ly URL shortening service to get a shorter one. If you have a free account with bit.ly you can assign a custom name to your URL.

How do you edit settings for a page?

Once on the page, Edit Page is on the left side:

You have a ton of control here:

Here’s each in brief:

• Manage Permissions: Who gets to post content
• Basic Information: A basic description of the page.
• Profile Picture: An image representing the page. It can be anything and doesn’t have to be a photo of you.
• Marketing: If you’re a business, you may want to look into "Advertise on Facebook", otherwise the only one you’d probably be interested in here is "Send an update", which does send a broadcast-style newsletter in email to anyone joined to your fan page (very useful!)
• Manage Admins: If you want particular people joined to your fan page to have editing control of it, you would do that here.
• Apps: This is where you modify specific settings for what appears in your tabs.
• Mobile: If you use text messaging a lot, this will be of interest to you, otherwise it won’t.
• Insights: This will be blank at first until your fan page starts getting traffic. From it you can see how many people visited per day, demographics and much more. Consider this a "hit tracker" of sorts for your fan page.

Drawbacks?

Almost no notifications

You will not be notified when new fans join, nor will you notified when anyone posts anything new unless it’s a reply to something you posted beforehand. What this means is that you will have to check the fan page manually for new content.

This however is no different than most forums, which also won’t notify you whenever someone posts something new.

Facebook account required

Obviously this is necessary, but it also counts as a drawback as some people you may want to get in on this don’t have a Facebook account.

Other than that, there are no other drawbacks. The Facebook pages feature is simple, easy to administrate, does not require the adding of friends and works very, very well as simple collaborative message board.