On April 19, 2010 Facebook introduced and launched a new set of pages called “Community Pages.” For the past few months I’ve been studying the new pages and working with Facebook to understand their potential. Prior to this announcement, Facebook offered 5 core types of pages:

Personal Profile Pages: These are pages for individuals who are using Facebook to connect with other people and not for business purposes. If you have a Facebook profile, this is your page.

Fan Pages: These are pages created by people that covered content ranging from activities (eg Running), people (generally celebrities) or things (eg pecific book).

Business Pages: For the most part these act just like a combination of personal and Fan Pages. They are for companies only and provided a means for aggregating information about a specific company and connecting with fans of a brand.

Group Pages: This was a catch all that allowed people to create pages around a specific interest that was generally tied to a common shared experience (eg breast cancer survivors) or as a rallying area for a common local interest (eg Chicago Lake Shore Running Group).

Event Pages: These were used just like an invitation. They contained all the information about a specific event and generally offered the ability to indicate if you would attend the event.

Please note, there are several other type of pages, but these are the major ones.

While these pages all existed for different reasons and served different audiences, there was one key element that made them all very similar. All of these pages allowed for a specific owner or set of owners for the page. As a person, you own and can therefore manage your personal profile page. The same holds true for Fan Pages, Business Pages, Group Pages and Event Pages. The content on the page was editable because there was a clearly defined owner. That owner could update photos, bios, and descriptions. They could also manage access to pages and control what features (eg discussion boards) would be included.

Community Pages are the first type of page that has no owner. The owner is Facebook. You can’t transfer ownership of the page from Facebook, edit the content or even formally request that the content be changed (even when it’s in accurate). This is because Community Pages are organic. Facebook creates them automatically and the content on the pages are derived from a collection of sources internally and externally. The biggest information provider is Wikipedia.

Facebook claims that Community Pages are meant to be, “the best collection of shared knowledge on a topic.” This is really up for debate. After all one could easily argue that a single person or company has the best collection of shared knowledge.

Community Pages are currently in beta, but my guess is that they’re here to stay. Why? Because Community Pages do 2 very important things for Facebook:

1. The make it easier to understand what users really like? For example if I had running in my user profile, this will now be linked automatically to a Community Page on running. This makes it easier for a company like Nike to target me. Prior to Community Pages I could have updated the interests area of my profile to read “running through the mud and getting dirty.” While that may be true, it’s more complicated for Facebook to understand if that means I like running or I like mud or I just like getting dirty. In short, Community Pages create a smarter, simpler and better-organized tagging structure for what people like, by forcing people to customize their profiles based on the available community pages that exist. This ultimately makes it easier for marketers to connect with users.
2. Community Pages are 100% public and exposed to search engines. This inherently will drive more traffic to Facebook.com and begin to position Facebook as a threat to sites like Wikipedia.

WHAT THIS NEWS MEANS FOR YOU AND YOUR CLIENTS

• You now have another page to monitor as part of your Social Business strategy. In addition to your business, events, groups, etc. pages you’ll need to make sure that your Community Page (assuming one exists) is being monitored.
• It will become more challenging for users to find your official business page. It’s possible that they’ll end up at the Community Page and assume it’s your Business Page. The need to tightly integrate social into your other pieces of real estate has become more important. For example providing a simple link from your website to your official Facebook Business Page could make all the difference.
• Your Wikipedia page just became one of the most important pieces of interactive real estate. Making sure it’s updated, current and accurate can make a big difference in the accuracy of the Community Page
• Each Community Pages does ask for your help to improve it. This is currently being down by allowing you to suggest the “Official Facebook Page.” It’s a fairly simple process and something you should do in every applicable instance. Unfortunately, right now, Facebook has not made it clear what the impact of doing this has on the Community Page or your Official page.

SO NOW WHAT

I can’t stress enough that these pages are currently in beta and may end up evolving over time. However, even as they evolve it’s clear that the need to treat social as a holistic entity instead of a platform specific one is a must. Wikipedia, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, your official Company Page, etc. will all play a role in shaping the content of Community Pages. To make Community Pages work hard for your brand you’ll need to do 3 things:

1. Ensure that you have an effective monitoring program in place that includes sites like Wikipedia.
2. Proactively monitor the Community Pages for your brand and when possible suggest the official Business Page.
3. Invest in social curation. This is a relatively new phenomenon, but a very important one. Social curation is the habit of making sure your content across social sites is well organized, accurate, tagged appropriately and linked to the right sites. Many companies are hiring the role of “Community Manager” to handle social curation or asking their agency partners to include it as part of their social business monitoring/engaging scope.

Fun time ahead. As Facebook says jump we all say how high.