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FORTY-NINE

Set Up a Facebook Fan Page

We’ve spent quite a bit of time—for good reason—on the importance of using Twitter to expand your reach. But you don’t want to forget Facebook. It’s more than just something you use to keep track of the latest news from your friends and family.

Facebook lists some incredible stats:¹

• It has more than eight hundred million active users.

• The average user is connected to eighty community pages, groups, and events.

• On average, more than two hundred fifty million photos are uploaded per day.

• More than seventy languages are available on the site.

• More than 75 percent of users are outside of the United States.

• More than seven million apps and websites are integrated with Facebook.

Facebook’s global reach is obvious, but still many people resist using it. I have vacillated on this myself. Then I came to the realization that Facebook itself is not the problem. I am. Facebook is simply a tool. It has its quirks and issues, to be sure. But the root problem was that I didn’t have a strategy for how to use it.

Initially, my “friend policy” (if you could call it that) was to simply accept any and all comers. I figured the more friends, the better. But this resulted in a huge amount of noise, not to mention added workload. I grew weary of all the friend requests, invites, and notifications.

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It also made me think long and hard about my vocabulary. Like many people, I had begun to use the term friend in a very loose way. The first thing I did in rethinking my strategy was to tighten up my definitions of key terms:

• Family. These are the people who are related to you by blood or by marriage. I have occasionally been too loose with this term. Family does not mean your close personal friends or your “work family.” Calling them that is not accurate or helpful. It creates the illusion of something that is not true. It is best to use this word as it was intended.

• Friends. These are the people you know in real life. They are people you have met face-to-face, enjoy being around, and interact with in real life. (These three elements are key.)

• Acquaintances. These are people you have met online or off. You may know their names or even their faces. You may even have been friends at some point in the past, but you don’t have an ongoing relationship. You only know one another on a superficial level, and that’s fine. You just have to be clear that these are not your friends.

• Fans. These are the people who know your public persona or your work. This is also where you might get confused . . . because the relationship is not mutual. For example, I am a fan of Chris Brogan. We have even met once. I know lots of stuff about him, because of his blog and Twitter posts. This creates the illusion of intimacy. If I was not careful, however, I could fool myself into thinking I have a relationship with Chris. I don’t. I’m just one of his many fans.

So with those definitions in mind, I set out to rethink my approach to Facebook. Basically, I have decided that I will only use my Facebook profile for family and close friends. This prevents my in-box from being flooded with sales pitches and invitations to things I don’t care about.

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Nonetheless, realizing that more people are on Facebook than Twitter and that at least 5 percent of my blog traffic comes from Facebook, I decided to create a fan page for everyone else who wants to connect with me.

For the record, I dislike the term fan page. It makes me very uncomfortable. Instead, I wish Facebook would use the term public pages for fan pages and private pages for profiles. I think that better represents the distinction between the two.

Regardless, my Twitter feed shows up in both places. The interaction on my fan page is more limited, though, which is what I need in order to preserve my sanity. My “fans” can write on my wall and I will reply back as I am able—just like I do with Twitter direct messages and replies.

Once I set up the fan page, Facebook tech support was kind enough to move all of my friends over to the fan page. I then proceeded to unfriend everyone on my profile page who wasn’t a family member or a close, real-life friend. I went from over twenty-two hundred friends on Facebook to less than one hundred. It should be noted that the best way to do it now is set up your fan page and ask your Facebook friends to move to it. Some will. Some won’t.

This was a slow and tedious process because I had to unfriend people one at a time. Facebook doesn’t currently provide a way to unfriend people en masse. It took a few hours over several evenings to power through it. If I had to do it again, I probably would have just deleted my account and started over. It would have been easier.

Here are some of the key lessons I took away:

• You have to understand the difference between friends, acquaintances, and fans.

• If you try to be everyone’s friend, you will be no one’s friend. You must be deliberate and selective.

• You will probably offend some of the people you unfriended. That’s okay. Your sanity and real friends are more important than meeting the expectations of fans and acquaintances.

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• You need to be very careful whom you accept as a friend on your profile going forward. Just based on mouse clicks, it’s three times as much work to unfriend someone as friend him.

In this crazy world of social media, I think we need to remain thoughtful and flexible about how we connect online, drawing clear distinctions between public and private. Nonetheless, what works today may not work tomorrow. What works with one hundred followers may not work with ten thousand followers. You should expect to rethink your online strategies at some point in the future.