Subscribers vs likes on your fan page.

Ok so I am resigning to the fact that many people just won’t like my fan page and prefer to be friends – for whatever reason.

I have noticed that people keep subscribing to my personal page (FB have only made this all the more harder through adding this feature) and my subscription base is growing daily without me even trying to promote this (obviously my subscriptions are coming through propagating social media channels). I now have over 700 ‘subscribers’.

Despite having created discussions on my personal page with heated debate, relating to my audience, taking on feedback, and creating several ‘spammy-type’ FB events asking people to please come across to like my fan page so I can in turn like theirs… people are reluctant. Very reluctant. Almost impossible even.

So, I am wondering if it is even worth all this stress trying to build my fan page?

I know statistics are nice, and fan pages are supposed to be more professional bu are they really? And for what purpose?

My page is about supporting people first and foremost. I do this through liking their pages, circulating their content to a broader audience for further exposure and offering email support in some cases.

I can do this through my personal page (except for the liking part as have maxed out at 5000) and am able to see their more personal information/work and ideas through being ‘friends’ as often they do not have fan pages and permissions are restricted. Know what I mean?

Ideas?

The fact that major public figures like Mark Zuckerberg himself only have a ‘subscription’ base, for whatever reason leads me to ask this question.

Right now the only real disadvantage is that I have to post twice. Once to my personal page and once to my fan page. The fan page grows slowly and steadily, whereas my personal page is bombed with requests all day everyday and people taking up the subscription option.

Feedback welcome here.

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AB

Art I have some insight. I built a page to 20,000 fans in 2 years and was getting about 50 interactions per post total (comments and likes).

Subscribe has been available for just over 3 months and I have about 2,700 subscribers. I am getting almost 100 interactions with each post even though I have almost 10% of the audience.

Combine that with the way Facebook is now promoting subscriptions I would say Pages are in a bit of trouble.

If apps are released for Profiles it could really damage pages.

Hope that helps quantify your question a bit! 

Hi — if you are branding yourself — just go with the Subscription model. If you are branding a product — keep the business page active. You can only create ads if you keep the business page. You can always guide people over to Subscribe. 

Thanks Phylis and Jessie,

If it makes any difference I am creating a ‘brand’ or ‘identity; with Art Bitch. How I best explain this is that ‘Art Bitch;, aside from my identity, has been set up as a fictional character of sorts, an open platform so that accessible for everyone.

In this sense I see it as a brand, and this is why I will be taking the brand to a web platform, with logo’s, hero image, a statement, a mission and vision, etc.

This will hopefully become more of a business and less of a hobby and so you cn see how the ‘brand’ is starting to take shape.

Still, not sure if this changes anything re the fan page, although advertising is a good point, I am still kind of land-locked with the subscription base.

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AB

Thanks!

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AB

@arty @miguelcurrey @phyllis-khare @chrissmith great vquestion and awesome answers, thanks everyone, this will help me too