I am simply amazed by the lack of involvement with companies and social media. Maybe it is really just a lack of general knowledge about what social sites like Facebook can do for their brand. Take the free Facebook fan pages for example. The best feature about them is that they are free and they allow people to become a fan of your product or your company.

Lets say you have a product called "carx". You take "carx" and create a nice .com site for it with campaigns that drive traffic to it, etc. That all takes money, sure that is fine, but for free you can do much the same thing, but using word of mouth to drive traffic to your site and help you build brand identity.

Here are a couple of things you may not have known about a fan page:

• It is indexed by google, whereas groups are not.
• You can add custom bits of FBML code that allows you to customize the group page, which you can't do with groups.
• You can add applications, which you can't do with groups.
• You can restrict the fan page so that only you can post information, basically turning off the ability to allow fans to add content. This lets the fan page function much as a normal website does, allowing you to dish out content.

I do think that companies and agencies alike are missing an opportunity here to grow into social markets and take hold of the brand identity on those sites. I have seen lots of user generated fan pages for products. While that is great, the company has no control over what is posted on those fan pages and some of those pages have hundreds of thousands of fans. If the company that owned that product had been the one creating that page they would have had control over messaging for their brand.

I guess that is the thing about situations like this. If you don't get on the boat fast enough, it will sail and leave you standing on the dock. If you have questions about Facebook fan pages, feel free to ask me below and I will be happy to help.

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