Imagine Your Reality

Facebook is continuing to make major changes in what it does and what it offers. Most recently, you can longer become a fan of a fan page. Instead you choose if you will like it. I’ve already written about why I think the move of word choice from Fan to Like is a bad idea, but another problem with Facebook, and in my opinion, the big problem is the weird blend of personal accounts and fan page accounts that hasn’t been fully separated, and probably never will be.

If you want to open an account for your business on Facebook you need to get a fan page. However, to do that, you have to get a personal account first. Once you’ve set up your personal account, you can create a fan-page account, but there are still problems that occur, because your fan-page isn’t truly a separate account. For example, if I create an event on my fan page, and want to invite people to it, I can’t invite my fans. Instead, I end up inviting my friends from my personal account, even though none of those people might be my fans or interested in what I’m doing. This makes the event tool less than useful and also creates potential spam issues with your friends.

And if you want to get notifications for your fan page, you can’t get those notifications. The only notifications you can get are for your personal profile. This means you need to check your fan-page, as opposed to getting notifications about it. It’s not a very convenient feature for busy business owners who don’t always want to check in on their fan-page just to see if some activity has occurred.

Even putting aside the functionality issues, the core problem is that while Facebook is integrating everything into the internet, it can’t get it’s own internal in order in a way that’s actually helpful to its users. So if it can’t effectively create functionality on its own site that streamlines the user experience, what makes Facebook think it’ll do any better on the internet at large? Facebook, if you’re reading this post, fix it so we actually have separate accounts for our personal profiles and fan (excuse me like) pages and so we can get the same level of functionality on both accounts instead of on one.

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I’ve always found word choice interesting because it can indicate so much about what motivates someone to do something. Evidently Facebook does as well, because they are changing the wording for joining a fan page from “Become A Fan” to “like”. I’m not sure this is the best move and I’ll explain why.

It might seem a good idea to use the word like as an indicator that you like a fan page, but I can’t help think of a conversation an associate and I had, where he told me that he’d been given the advice to get on Facebook and make lots of friends, which struck him as somewhat bad advice, because what he wanted was a distinct and different profile for his friends and family and a business page for his fans.

When we use the word like it generally can denote a belief of liking something, or someone and in the case of someone wanting to be liked back. The problem, in the internet universe, with the word friend or the word like comes down to a realization that people form more personal attachments meanings to those words than they do to fan, which means that while they might become a fan of your personal there is awareness that being a fan doesn’t automatically make you a friend. When the word like is used however, there is a connotation of more personal connection. In fact, this issue has been raised before because Facebook only allows people to like statuses. So you can’t dislike anything written, which may of course spare some feelings, but ultimately creates an artificial sense of closeness as well.

What do you think? Should Facebook stick with “Become a Fan” or switch to “like”?