I must confess I’m a fan of Facebook Pages (bad pun!) I as use them regularly on behalf of brands. I’m a great advocate of Facebook for business, when it’s used the right way of course. That said, there are a few things that Facebook could improve when it comes to the Pages product that would make a big difference to the way brands can engage via Facebook Pages.

The ability to choose whether you post on behalf of the brand/page or as yourself – for example, it would be great if you could post with a Julie via Brand signoff or similar. This provides two key benefits:

1. More engaging / transparent for fans as they know exactly who it is they’re dealing with
2. Better security management for businesses as you’d be able to monitor who is speaking on behalf of the company

Notification via Facebook notifications and/or email and sms for posts and comments. This would assist with:

1. Timely responses to fan communications
2. Moderation of inappropriate content.

Bookmarking for pages and groups – For those who are on Facebook primarily for communicating with others and don’t wish to bookmark applications.

Extended HTML/rich text formatting – Facebook would really benefit from a WYSIWYG text editor (most people don’t know HTML, and Facebook is a mass market product. This means they could choose to employ FBML for text editing rather than HTML as well). The ability to do simple things like bold, italics and linking emails would be really useful  (not for pages alone, but on the entire Facebook platform). It would also be fantastic to be able to use tables, insert alt names into images (great for SEO since the pages come up in Google) and a variety of fairly basic rich text and HTML editing options.

Facebook provides excellent reporting with their Insights tool, and I especially like the new post insights. That said, there is no functionality to allow export of data from Facebook Insights to incorporate into social media monitoring and measurement. This is key for any brand engaging in social media, we NEED to be able to report our successes to management to prove the value of social media. It would also be great to have retrospective data, and the ability to conduct a search of the insights by a specified date range. A customisable insights dashboard would be very convenient.

I’m not the first to suggest this, Facebook need to provide the functionality to send messages to fans. There used to be an ‘update’ option which generally resulted in the messages being ignored. It seems as though messaging to fans is now restricted purely to status updates. Facebook groups allow you to send a message to all members, so it seems odd this option doesn’t exist for Pages. The ability to send updates either via Facebook messages would be a massive improvement. Targeting of messages would be key (updates and statuses can be targeted). I’m finding it increasingly important to be able to be able to send direct messages to fans as well, someone may ask a question that is better answered confidentially, or you may want to send some sort of a moderation warning to a fan instead of just immediately blocking them.

That’s just a few improvements that I think would greatly improve Facebook Pages. Are there any more you can think of?

Related Posts:

• The New Facebook Page Changes
• Facebook Roundup
• Content is King: Incentivising user content creation
• Digital Media Ethics: Privacy
• On Creating Chaos, or: How NOT to manage an online community