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What is missing to Facebook "Fan Pages" to become curation pages?

  • Today, users "like" a topic (e.g. "Justin Bieber") and see content (articles, videos, pictures...) about it. If FB would automatically add content from the web (Wikipedia, Medias, Blogs & Forums) or other social networks (Myspace, Youtube), would it be enough for Fan Pages to be seen as a curation tool?

  • Answer:

    There are in my opinion two aspects which prevents this from happening in a satisfying manner: 1. From a reader's point of view: Do I want to mix in the same place content from my friends and content from my areas of interest? The more fan pages I like, the less I see what my friends are doing. I think Facebook pages are attractive to brands, celebrities and publishers in general because Facebook has such a massive audience but I suspect users will eventually hide or dislike overtime pages because it creates noise distracting them from their friends' signal. Or I might be wrong and Facebook might end up absorbing the whole Web and not just its friend/social aspects but then it will become a bit like Yahoo: a place to find everything which is not very good at anything in particular. I think our areas of interest deserves something different and more specific, a platform that would really be good for discovering content in my areas of interest (working on that one...). 2. From a publisher's point of view What you describe - or what could be achieved by a FB algorithm - is filtering and not curation. This is my answer that describes how both are different: You could argue that owners of Fan pages could also be performing social curation on Facebook pages and yes, to a certain extent, they can. However, we've found working on http://Scoop.it and deeply thinking about curators' needs and what should be done to make curation gratifying and simple, that it takes more than that and a dedicated platform. Here's why: - Editorial control: posts on a Fan Page can not be re-organized. Once posted, they're only displayed in that order. You can't highlight a post you find particularly interesting or re-order to give a hierarchy to content other than chronology. - Publishing control: anyone can post to your Fan page. A curator - or a group of curators - want to remain in control of what gets published. - Format control: posts are displayed in always the same way without any chance to resize the post, the image, etc... It's like a newspaper where every article would have the same size. - Look & Feel control: all Facebook pages look the same and customization options are limited. - Content control: Facebook takes down pages that don't match their T&C's. I had an example of a http://Scoop.it user who was a History teacher that had a page on Mao Zedong's history that was taken down without explanation. - Content sourcing: to be efficient, curators need to be inspired and have ways of identifying content on the topics they want to cover. Facebook doesn't provide any help with that.

Guillaume Decugis at Quora Visit the source

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For brands where a lot of the content generated by their fans lives outside of Facebook, it's actually a great idea for the brand to act as a curator and pull in the best of that content to a fan tab for the benefit of their Facebook followers. Take for example, – a brand with a lot of enthusiasts saying great things about them on Twitter and posting fun and colorful photos to Instagram. For special promotions like Fashion Week and their partnership with for the color of the year (Tangerine Tango), they launched fan tabs that pulled in a best-of curated feed of near-real-time content from both Facebook and non-Facebook social sources. Sephora fans who only follow them on Facebook got to see all of the great external content being generated – served up nice and neat right within Facebook. They use (full disclosure: I founded FeedMagnet) to pull in social feeds, curate the content, and push it back into their Facebook tabs. does something similar on their Facebook tab for the Olypics, Citi Every Step (https://apps.facebook.com/citieverystep/), curating Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social content from olympic athletes, then displaying it in the fan tab once you've joined. Facebook fan tabs are like canvases (Facebook actually calls them that) for a brand to paint on – filling them in with the things they believe their fans will want to see. Curated social content is great way to do that. It's important to note that curation requires a curator. If Facebook were to blindly aggregate content from outside sources, it is unlikely that it would actually be relevant. More importantly, the act of curation – separating signal from noise – is the critical step to end up with a stream of content interesting enough that people actually want to see it. Bottom line: curated social content on fan tabs is a great thing for brands – but it should be a proactive curated approach, vs. the simple aggregation that Facebook could do automatically.

Jason Ford

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