OMG OMG Will You Fan Me? Fan Me? FAN FAN FAN??

WM2006 Fan Fest Stuttgart - Iranische Fans by dheuer on Flickr

This Sunday was a crazy race to get the vanity URL for your Facebook business page. Unfortunately, I was one of those obnoxious people who updated their Facebook status every 5 mintues saying “Please fan my page!”

I felt into the whole thing pretty innocently. I am launching an eco-friendly real estate product this August, (ECOJOE) and I literally launched the Facebook page for it on Saturday. Once I made the page live, one of my Twitter followers pinged me and said:

“Hey great page, but you need 25 fans to get a vanity URL.”

Okay, not a big deal at all. By the time Sunday mid-afternoon, I had 25 fans already without prodding people about it. By the time I got back from dropping my best friend off at the airport, I got another message.

“Oops, Facebook just bumped it up to 100! Good luck I am off the to beach!”

Whaaat? It’s already 5pm, and I’m at 27 fans.

I struggled with the thought a little bit: should I really bug my friends about it? I don’t like to be spammed, so why should I start bugging people about it? But but, I’m running a business after all, if I don’t be proactive about it, who is gonna do it? I thought about it, wait a minute, I do have 3,400 followers on Twitter, I can totally do it, right?

My finding was….. Maybe.

Most of the time on Twitter or any social media atmosphere, there are just so much noise and voices out there. Your message can easily be diluted, depending what time and what day of the week you are posting, unless your audience only has 20 friends in their social atmosphere which means they would essentially be reading every update you posted (then it would really suck for them being flooded by your status updates).

Oh but it takes some leveraging. If you can get your message out appropriately and an influencer re-published your message, you can easily amplify your message and get to your goal.

With the mad dash, I was able to get to 100 fans at 11pm Sunday night. Sure it took a lot of work, but it’s quite extraordinary to add 80 fans in a day when you are a brand new product and your page is only alive for a day.

You know what I learned throughout this experience?

1. My friends are nice enough to put up with the constant updates from me, because they are friends. (or simply they are not on Facebook At All…) (Plus the ones who can’t take it, they already ditched me.)
2. Post things to your profile, yes, adds virality to your content. But if you need something, ask directly is best. Asking directly yields the best results.
3. People may surprise you. I was really surprised when people I’ve never met fell out of nowhere and retweeted my content on Twitter. How nice!

Oh, and what’s the point of this vanity URL? It’s so I can write

this: www.facebook.com/ecojoe

instead of this: http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?topic=9774&post=43003&uid=87309763850#/ecojoe

People may question the validity of a vanity URL, but I personally am loving the fact that I have one. It saves me time and effort of re-shrinking the URL every time and easy reference for ECOJOE inquiries. It’s just awesomeness.

Related reading: Agent Genius: Facebook Fan Pages — I love Me, Will You Love Me too?