New Discovery Interface for Facebook Pages

Facebook's new pages discovery interface

Just spotted a new discovery interface for Facebook Pages.

The various brand pages are sorted according, I assume, to their weight within Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithms for ranking content.  So, the most popular pages, among my friends, appear first.

But, wait! What are Liverpool FC and Tottenham Hotspur doing in there? I support Arsenal but it seems more of my friends support Tottenham and Liverpool… oh dear, my social network is out of sync.

Now, what do you call someone who thinks they are in one social tribe, but are in fact in another…?

Did Facebook just kill the “landing tab”?

Now the only place you can direct new fans to is Wall or Info instead of any tab as before

I noted a round robin email from Rasmus in Copenhagen this morning, complaining that “landing tabs” – the feature that lets you decide what tab non-fans arrive at, seems to have disappeared from Facebook pages.  There’s been quite a bit of industry on the blogs such as all facebook and mashable explaining how to make landing tabs and its something we at Nudge have made quite a few of.

But as of today they are gone… perhaps never to return?

Wake up Britain! Look at the tip of the iceberg! The BNP might be winning the Facebook war.

I appreciate this is controversial post but in measuring social media success we measure fan engagement.

That means not just number of fans, but how active those fans are on a campaign page, in particular how much do they comment?

Lets take a look at the data.

If we rank the political party pages BNP, Conservative, DUP, Green, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Plaid  Cymru, SNP,  UKIP by fan page, a reassuring and expected ranking appears:

Facebook Fans of main UK Political Parties at 12:40pm on 14 April

The big three appear to be winning, the little parties are seemingly down where they “belong”.

However, if we count wall posts by fans in the last hour, the  picture is quite different:

Fan wall posts on main UK Political Party Facebook Pages at 12:40pm on 14 April

The data is startling – if we measure fan engagement – the amount Facebook users are commenting and engaging with a campaign – BNP emerges as a major contender for public opinion.

Despite that their 17 fan posts were generated by only 6 people, there is still cause for concern.

On their own page the BNP are driving a political message that is causing reaction and generating debate. Something the other smaller parties seem unable to do and the bigger parties only just manage. As we know on Facebook – the more social actions we can activate (whether positive or negative) the more a campaign message spreads automatically across the social media machine.

At one level, Facebook is an invisible platform, you can’t see the private debates being held between friends but the more user generated posts, the more the BNP related content is spreading across the platform. Think of fan posts as the “tip of the iceberg”….

We need to wake up and engage with the issues that are bringing BNP votes and provide real solutions that are not just papering over the cracks.

Facebook’s own Democracy UK page is a good place to start, maybe with the Ministry of Mates application:

The Ministry of Mates app creates socially remixed stories on Facebook