Niponwave

Wondering if it is sensible to keep a Facebook page. Encouraged by friends like PC, I floated a FB page sometime back to keep a professional face on the social network. Recently though, Facebook brought about a radical change by rolling out the subscriptions feature. This feature essentially makes the FB friending system a lot like Twitter. Clearly FB has copied Google Plus here!

The idea is you can have subscribers right on your profile instead of fans on your page! Interestingly, following the launch of this new feature, Zuckerberg did away with his page and converted all his Page Fans into subsribers of his personal profile! Making me seriously reconsider if having a page is a good idea anymore.

If you don’t want to friend somebody you can simply subscribe to his/her Facebook. Again, if you reject a friend request, the user becomes your subscriber, just like Twitter followers. Consider this: most of us end up rejecting a good many requests every month. You can now keep them as your subscribers if you wish!

Updating a separate page all the time is hard work. It may seem pointless to post the same update twice - on the page and the profile. A page is also less personal. Ensuring the growth and spread of a page is also another challenge whereas profiles grow much faster in a word-of-mouth style. In fact, it is a lot easier to gain subscribers than fans! However, privacy can become a headache. While there is the provision of keeping the more personal updates hidden from subscribers, I may not remember that every time! It only makes sense to allow subscriber comments. This may actually lead to a chaotic situation on my wall!

What do you think? Should I merge the page and profile? Or not?