Facebook has finally allowed films, bands, nonprofits, businesses and other entities to have a page of their own on the hugely popular social networking site, using the "Pages" element of their new Facebook Ads program.
This is actually a big deal -- before this change the only way to have a presence on Facebook was to be an individual human (how 1996 of them). They didn't just discourage films, bands or businesses -- they were actively hostile to them.
We know this from experience. My crack team of interns (students from UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz) came up with a great outreach campaign for Quality of Life via Facebook. We put up a profile for the film and started adding friends. We quickly hit the daily limit of 150 new friends, which was an annoyingly low limit but we could live with it if necessary.
The response was great. Our new friends were excited about the film and clearly jazzed to be part of the Quality of Life movement.
Our goal was to do with Facebook what we did with MySpace (where we have over 17,000 friends): use it as a way to introduce the film to new prospective fans. Since we didn't have money to buy big ads, we had used MySpace to build our audience for the theatrical release of the film, as well as the DVD (to this day, MySpace drives DVD sales from our website probably better than anything else).
Quality of Life was the first film to "break" out of MySpace, when we won the first MySpace Film Users Choice contest and then sold out three nights in a row when we opened the film in New York City.
We figured Facebook was the new cool site -- all our students at UC Santa Cruz used Facebook instead of MySpace ("no one uses MySpace anymore" was a common refrain we heard from college students). So we figured we would spread the word there, the way we did via MySpace.
However, after about three days of hugely successful friend-adding, the account was suspended by Facebook Central Services (or Faceless Central Services, to more accurately describe the experience). Annoyed, we emailed them and found out that the account had been suspended since it wasn't a person. Only real human beings were allowed to have profiles.
Facebook had shut us down.
So much for our new fans and our big fat exciting Facebook strategy.
Yes, we could have started a Facebook group, but you can't do outbound marketing with a group. People have to find the group first and add themselves. Not exactly a pro-active approach to build a large audience.
Contrast that to MySpace, which doesn't police anything it seems. Anything can have a MySpace page which is both useful and so annoying due to the hordes of spammers. Clearly, being non-human is not a limiting factor on MySpace.
Facebook built its walled (and barb-wired) garden in response to this. Great for users (nearly no spam), but not so great for indie films/bands/media and the little guys trying to build an audience.
Ironically, it's MySpace (the indie-centric, hands-off wild west) that's owned by the massive transnational conglomerate and it's Facebook (the Stalinesque we-know-what's-best-for-you church-run summer camp) that has sworn to remain an independent company.
But I digress.
Because now, us non-humans (i.e. films, bands, clubs, nonprofits, businesses, etc.) can finally have a "page" on Facebook.
Great! It's about time! Let's get started building that new audience!!!
Well, hold on. It's not all sunshine and free beer.
Turns out this new "Pages" function (yeah, that's what it's called: "Pages") does NOT allow you to do any friend requests (outside of the profile of the author of the Page.
In other words, it's really not much better than just having a boring old Facebook group -- boring in terms of outbound marketing (i.e. reaching out to new people is not possible).
But wait! You actually CAN reach a new large audience -- it just costs money. That's the bottom line: it's all about the bottom line. The way that Facebook Ads has been structured is that YES, you can now have a "Page" for your film, but in order to reach new people, you need to buy advertising. That's the only way to add friends that are otherwise strangers, unlike MySpace where you just reach out to whomever you want that's already on the site.
From a Facebook financial perspective, that makes great sense (thank you MBAs of the world), but from a community and indie media perspective, it blows.
Who gets to benefit? The big brands that already have a ton of awareness and thus don't need to do much outreach and/or have a ton of cash to spend on ads.
Yay Facebook! Great way to support the indie spirit.
I'd rather have a bit of spam and a free flowering of indie marketing for alternative music, film, clubs, art and the like with MySpace -- instead of the sanitized, Brave-New-Worldly "protection" of Facebook.
But Facebook is where our audience is, so we'll figure something out.
In any case, you should check out the new Facebook Ads features, including Pages. The DIY film audience is there, so you should be there too.
Sadly, we might end up having to use our checkbook.
Welcome to the future of social media.