HOT TIP: Building your Fan Base is More Important than Ever!

There has been a lot of big news from Facebook over the past few days and while the reaction from consumers and developers has been mixed, the news for Fan Page owners is exciting! To begin, the action of 'becoming a fan' will now be dramatically more viral because every time someone becomes a fan of your brand a newsfeed will automatically be published (e.g. "Joe became a fan of XYZ Brand"). This means that for every person that fans your Page, potentially hundreds of their friends will be exposed to your brand and many of them may choose to become your fan also. For Fan page owners, this will result in even greater brand exposure and should make it easier to build your fan base. Of course, you still need to give Facebook users a reason to want to become a fan of your brand - that's where Wildfire's tools can be so powerful (FYI, last week we launched a campaign for a nationwide gifts company that generated 100K fans in just 4 days!).

Also positive are proposed changes to the friend invite (otherwise known as "Facebook Requests") functionality of fan page applications. Currently, when users wish to invite their friends to engage with a Fan Page application they choose from an alphabetical list of all their friends. Given that the average Facebook user has 150 friends, this makes it very time consuming for users to carefully select relevant friends and many end up either not inviting their friends or randomly selecting friends (usually those with names beginning with 'A'!). According to new changes proprosed by Facebook, the new friend selector will include better ways to categorize and sort friends so that users can more easily select those friends for whom a given invitation will be particularly relevant. We anticipate that this will result in a much higher response rate to friend invites.

Finally, Facebook also announced exciting plans with regard to Fan Page analytics. Details are limited at this stage, but according to Facebook they will soon be providing a richer analytics experience for Fan Page owners, which should make it easier for Page owners to evaluate the performance and value of their fan interactions.