I am sick of fan requests from Facebook. Even if they change their name from “fan” to “like” I am still going to want to projectile vomit when I get one.
I do not understand the benefit or value of requesting this of me.
If I like bananas, I like bananas, if I am into bananas enough to be a fan of a banana Facebook page, I will do it without prodding.
If prodding is required, it probably isn’t very true or valuable. If one has to be probed and prodded to be a “fan” then how much of a fan is that person.
I have never interviewed a cow.
I bet if I did interview a cow, and asked it why it moved from one area of a field to another it would probably say something like “I liked the grass over there but then I got prodded to move over here.”
I am not not going to pretend that people understand how I think but to translate the last couple of sentences I wrote… I am not a cow.
All Facebook fan requests go right to my spam folder.
Prodded fans aren’t fans and do not indicate anything, and I guess you will all figure that out soon enough, just like search engines will.
Facebook Fan Requests Make Me Want to Projectile Vomit
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By Patrick Sexton, who has been helping webmasters with the Google Webmaster Guidelines and other issues since 2005.
While I can fully understand anyone’s irritation with many things on the web, I’m not in agreement.
Requesting to be “fanned” one time just serves as notice that you have a presence on Facebook. I’m OK with that. If you hit me up 10 times in a month, that’s crap. A one-time reach out to let me know you exist is cool.
If I’m a business owner, and I am, I can’t rely on the community to rally around me all the time. Sometimes you need to start the ripple yourself, I know I do.
My take is more small biz though … and big brands are different.
I’d say it’s OK to invite the cow to come over, maybe the cow didn’t know about the other grass. If you try to push or pull the cow, then you’re going to far.
BTW, I always enjoy rant posts.
This whole social craze is breaking my concentration!
Give it a year or two, & you’ll be begging that cow to be your FB-Fan, LOL
Moo…
Aaron I understand your point well, but I also understand that if something isn’t valuable, it isn’t valuable. As an illustration of this as it regards small businesses I would offer you these scenarios:
scenario one: A Facebook page that doesn’t do anything.
Someone does a “fan me” at Facebook email campaign. The user then fans. Nothing else happens. In this scenario there is no value to the customer.
scenario two: A Facebook page that does something.
If your Facebook page provides value to the customer somehow, then this whole interaction makes a heck of alot more sense. Fan us on Facebook and get daily specials on our products. Every week we choose one fan and give them a prize. These thing make sense.
But in truth I wrote this post as just an internet user, I wasn’t really even thinking small business when I wrote. But if something is irritating it is irritating.
The thing that makes fan requests irritating to me is that I have stopped seeing the point of responding to the dozens of requests I get daily. The reason I do not see the point is because it has been my experience that after I press “I am a fan” nothing else happens.
I have not had even one experience where I said…
“boy, I’m sure glad I fanned them because I am getting soo much value from it.”
Just my opinion
“Prodded fans aren’t fans”…
I dunno Pat, I mean, I can understand where you’re coming from when it comes to the whole “excessive, pointless fan requests” thing; heck, I’m tired of them too.
But isn’t there a point where prodding might be needed to get the word out? I understand your view that you should be so full of awesome that people seek YOU out instead of it having to be the other way around, but at the same time I also think that spreading the word about something new (AND awesome) is totally fine?
I couldn’t agree more. People/businesses ask me if they should have a facebook fan page and I’m like…how would that be useful? An email list would probably be far more effective.
Lol, love ranting post.
However I’m with Aaron and Matt on this one. Sometimes people don’t know something exist so I guess that’s where the ‘prodding’ comes in. It definitely becomes offensive when every other time I ignore the request I find another one waiting for me!
Now the part of getting something out of being a fan, that’s a different story. I guess it all comes down to what you want. Some people might get notification about a product now being available and discount available for fans, blah blah, now that might be what some people want but not exactly what YOU want. I guess it all comes down to finding the balance, but its pretty hard pleasing everyone I must say…
The only reason really that a Facebook Fan page is in the mix is the stat that Facebook gets searched more than Google. So, all we use a lot of our pages for is to stuff more keywords into Google and then brings people back around to our blog, which we use as a home base.
Probably a lot of extra work that may or may not need doing, but we don’t pretend that a Facebook Fan page is anything else but one more location to put stuff that gets indexed that pulls people back to the web site/blog. Same thing for LinkedIn, which probably is even more of a waste of time.
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so true. i wish fan request would exists.