I know the blog's been a bit quiet this week, and here's why:
Frankly, I'm finding myself fed up with Facebook.
Now, I'm not counting myself in the camp of those users screaming, "BRING BACK THE OLD FACEBOOK!" -- I *like* the new Facebook, or at least I like its potential. Everything I said in my last article remains true: In theory, the new "Public Profile" Pages offer arts orgs a great opportunity to connect with fans.
It's just that in practice, there are a whole bunch of little features of the upgrade that seem either poorly thought-out, or outright broken.
Here's an example, from an e-mail I received this morning:
"Hi Michelle. I've been doing status updates for our Facebook page, but as far as I can tell, they are not showing up on our Fans' walls. They don't show up on my wall, and I just checked with another person in our organization who is not an admin but is a fan, and the updates are not on her wall either.(Short answer: both problems *might* be a browser issue? Try looking at FB in Internet Explorer and Firefox, see if the problems exist in both. There doesn't seem to be a definitive solution yet, though.)
Is there something I need to do to make the status updates show up on our fans' walls?
I'm also having problems with the Page where parts of the page appear layered over other parts. Sometimes the pictures of the Fans move around and appear on top of other sections."
If you take a look at the discussion board for "Facebook Pages/Public Profiles," you'll see that these issues are not the only ones. Problems with Pages are rampant! And they're not being addressed by Facebook at all. Since the launch, there hasn't been a single announcement from FB that they're aware of these issues, that they're listening to their users complaints... nothing.
So, I'm pretty frustrated.
That said, I will be blogging more regularly next week -- I was asked a whole novel's worth of excellent social media questions last weekend, and I'll start to dive into those soon.
Again -- feel free to comment! Are you frustrated by Facebook too? Is your Page experiencing these formatting problems?
Thanks for sticking with me!
1 comment:
My organization was experiencing the "our updates aren't showing up on our fan's walls" problem, too. At first I saw no remedy. But then, a couple of days ago I noticed, at the bottom of my "Public Profiles" wall filter, something called "See Hidden Posts" or something like that. I clicked that, and there was my organization's stuff! So on my personal page, I had to manually enable Public Profile postings. Then they started appearing -- at first only in the filtered Public Profile wall, but now also in my main newsfeed. Interestingly enough, both Barack Obama and TCG were not "hidden" in my Public Profile feed - not sure why they were exempt -- perhaps it has to do with sheer quantity of fans?
In any case, I am now seeing my organization's stuff on my personal page, because I manually OK'd them. I am currently assuming that any of our fans who haven't figured out this loophole are still not receiving our info.
'Tis a puzzlement why Facebook is not more communicative with its community, considering that is their mission!
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