Philip Wride – Social Media Marketer and Community Manager

As Facebook continues to roll out updates across personal pages (Timelines) and on brand pages it is feeling more and more like a billboard. The latest addition to brand pages, the nicely titled “people talking about” is another good example.

From a Community Manager perspective this arbitary number really gets me. “n talking about this”. So what? It’s just a number. At least give me some meaningful details. Who are those people? Where are they talking? Where and how can I interact with them? Are those people talking about my brand on another page that I’m not aware of? What are they saying? Is it positive?

It’s like Facebook suddenly had this cool idea to dangle a carrot under the noses of Community Managers except when you go to grab it, it’s not what you thought it was. At least with the number of fans I can click that number and actually see the people that have “liked” the page and can then analyse that based on the page insights.

This for me is another example of how Facebook isn’t about building communities, it’s just a gathering of people.