We recently renamed our game from our original working title to its current name. Doing so made our original Facebook Page obsolete, as there is no function in Facebook Pages for changing its name. From a user perspective, I can understand Facebook's position: I wouldn't want someone to be able to rename a Page that I was a fan of, but it did present us with a major challenge. We had already gotten more than 1000 fans on our old Page, and now we had to do something bad - ask them to visit the new Page and become a fan there instead. . Telling our fans that we have changed your name isn't neccessarily a bad thing, but asking them to actively take some kind of action in order to keep following us is bound to cost us some goodwill. Which is evident since only about 1/3 of the fans have actually followed us to the new site over the past two days since we announced the change.
To ease the transition, and to explain to our fans why this was neccessary, we wrote an update that we sent out to all our fans through the Facebook Pages Marketing tool. This was our first update since we set up the original Page, because we hadn't wanted to come across as a spamming Page in fear of loosing fans - and besides we haven't got a product ready for sale yet anyway. In other words, we hadn't tested the update system before, which was really too bad, because it turns out Facebook users aren't given notification when they receive updates from Pages! The update is just placed in a sub-folder in the Facebook message inbox, but doesn't trigger a "new mail" icon or email notification. The result is that no-one sees this update, and so we have to rely on relatively short-lived wall posts to notify our users of the change.
I can see that there are arguments for preventing Page admins from sending out mass emails to all its fans, but the result is that Page admins are left with very sparse communication tools here. And if a Page needs to change its name, like we did, a lot of the momentum is going to be lost.
The name thing is probably connected to this:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.tv2nyhetene.no/utenriks/mor-og-datter-havnet-i-pedogruppe-paa-facebook-3104399.html
(Only in Norwegian, but I am sure you can find it in English too.)
The biggest rock radio station in Belgium had over 100.000 fans on facebook when their page was removed without any notice or reason given.
ReplyDeletePainful shit like that happens all the time on FB. And I'm certain I get notified when I get a page update/message, but that's probably some setting I made aeons ago.
@ Robert: I totally get why it works the way it works, and they do explicitly warn about it when you create a page. Still, hassle.
ReplyDelete@ joon: Yes, this happens a lot. On the other hand, FB is a free service, so there are limits to how much one can demand - especially when using it for marketing. Marketing through social media is always going to be difficult.