Facebook’s Social Ads program already has some people upset, and at first glance, new product pages just look like another way in which users might be turned into billboards. But whether this is or isn’t the case, the pages are already catching on.
“[W]e’ve built a way for you to connect to things other than people, without cluttering your Friend List,” explained Justin Rosenstein on The Facebook Blog. “I love the Indian restaurant downstairs from Facebook HQ, and now that Junnoon has a Facebook Page, I can become a fan.”
Rosenstein then continued, “This is useful, not just to let Junnoon know I love their food, but also because my friends can see this affiliation on my profile or in their News Feeds and then go to Junnoon’s Page to learn more about it — or even make a reservation, thanks to an OpenTable app installed right on the page.”
Not every page is as well-developed as Junnoon’s, yet, in a short bout of testing, Facebook’s search function didn’t ever fail to find one. In fact, the range of people and things that can have pages is quite wide – there was at least one result each for Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, the Tesla Roadster, and Google. Also, after just a few days of life, those pages have attracted 24, 43, and 61 fans, respectively.
That won’t set any records – a surprisingly successful New York Times app drew over 1,000 users in a similar period of time. Still, Facebook’s product pages would seem to open yet another avenue in which the social network can bring people and potential advertisers together.
