As uMCLE’s Facebook Fan Page continues to develop at a glacial pace, I’ve noticed a sharp increase in the number of Fan Page suggestions to which my friends have recently subscribed.
I have also increasingly added Facebook Fan Pages, largely to support a cause, friend or colleague or for a shared sense of community and relation around a particular subject or issue.
As social media platforms expand to become more public, we respond by tempering our discourse, especially if representing a business. Instead, we can now declare our position and feel a sense of community by joining Fan Pages that mirror our interests or philosophy, like the Huffington Post or New York Times or wherever else our interests lie. And, we can also advocate our position on issues such as the health care reform mess by joining any number of Fan Pages.
Other opportunities for community and association include the following top-ten equally distributed Facebook Fan Page categories as identified by Tech Crunchies:
Non-profit : 7.5%
Organization : 7.4%
Music : 7.4%
Websites : 7.4%
Places : 7.4%
Services : 7.3%
Restaurants : 7.3%
Stores : 7.3%
Products : 7.3%
Celebrities : 7.0%
For a more in-depth perspective, Sysomos has published a comprehensive overview based on the analysis of the first large-scale study (600,000 Facebook Pages) to investigate usage patterns.
Intentionally or not, Facebook continues to play into our innate need for community, relation, to engage, to let our friends and extended family know that we’re doing okay, or that we’re not. And it has capitalized on this wildly exploding social media (or as Twitter luminary, Nicole Black calls it, intermedia) platform to do so.
