Metz, The Social Concept

Why Facebook’s New Fan Model Is Total Crap

June 26, 2009

Facebook prides itself on, and we the users, embrace it for its emphasis on privacy. We use the platform as, essentially, an online social directory, where we interact strictly with those who are in our existing networks. We have access to a lot of very detailed and personal information on Facebook — information that many would only feel comfortable sharing with those who they know personally, not the whole world.

This level of privacy is very different from that of Twitter, where it’s perfectly acceptable and even encouraged to follow new people, to build a new network, to find new resources and sources of information.

If an unfamiliar name were to add you on Facebook, you would likely ask yourself, “Where do I know this person from?” If you don’t know the person, they are likely to be in at least a similar network as you. With one platform focusing on privacy and another on openness, Facebook and Twitter have drifted away from each other and as a result, differ greatly in their use cases.

So why is Facebook attempting to tackle new ground—territory that almost seems antithetical to its bottom line: privacy? The users that we want to interact with on Facebook are those we already know and are already friends with, or could be friends with, so what is the point of just becoming a fan of another user’s profile when you could get the whole package?

If another user doesn’t reciprocate your desire to interact on the platform and refuses to be your friend, would you really want to settle for 1-way interaction? Such a situation almost seems desperate and what many Facebook users would call, stalker-like.

The only instances where I could see non-reciprocal friendships are limited to those with (1) high-profile individuals (celebrities) or (2) big brands (businesses). However, these entities are likely to already have Pages (and would prefer to protect their personal profiles from the general public), an area of Facebook that users have already embraced.

As Page fans, we already receive updates and can interact with the brand, which makes the new fan model totally redundant. Additionally, adding new status updates from individuals who are not really your friends to the wealth of information we already consume on Facebook only adds to the clutter. As Hazel Grace of METZ partner company Socialbees wrote in a previous post, “as you grow your friend list into a stranger list, your news feed becomes less and less valuable and extremely time consuming to manage.”

While Facebook seems like it would have the potential to be a great platform for sharing and spreading information on an even greater scale than Twitter, the idea of sharing status updates on its platform just wouldn’t work as well. The status updates that you gather information from would most likely be shared within the same network of people that you pulled it from, as networks on Facebook rely on real relationships, and reality is: our social circles overlap.

Perhaps Facebook should be spending more time on sussing out the inefficiencies and limitations of its branded Pages (more on that later) than trying to take on a platform that doesn’t really compete with it in the first place.

Melissa Chen is a Strategy Associate at METZ. She is a Media Studies major at UC Berkeley and is the President of Public Relations @ Cal.

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