If you’re disgruntled with your Facebook page, you’re not alone. The story goes something like this. Cheryl starts a Facebook page for her business. She requests all of her friends and family like the page. She links to it from her blog and email newsletters. She plunks down a few hundred dollars to pick up more fans with ads. Then, she decides to email them all, or do a report to see how many of her existing customers are fans. Then it hits her…

If you have a Facebook page with more than 500 fans,
there is no way to know who they are.

Background

A couple years ago, I coded up a script that would export up to 10,000 Facebook fans to a CSV file. I couldn’t get email addresses, but I could get photos, names and profile links. Facebook has now made that impossible. Now, all you can do is see 500 of your fans through your admin page.

This is a real problem for small companies and giant brands alike. Many companies spend thousands of dollars each month advertising to fans on Facebook. Through the course of multiple versions of the script, I’ve corresponded with people about how they use their Facebook page, why they need to get their fans out, and what other problems they have.

What Facebook page owners want

1. Reward a random fan

“We’re a small business looking to download our list of fans so that we can make a ‘true’ random selection of our users for contests.”

It is surprising that most page owners simply want to do a contest or raffle to select one page fan. Discovering this, I did a little bit of research and found it is against Facebook’s terms of service to pick a random fan. To be honest, the regulations around contests are really confusing.

It seems most people either use a Facebook event to build a list of entrants, or an app to manage their contests (which is different from just selecting a random fan). Several people are using random.org’s third-party draw service which is integrated with Facebook events. One draw for 100K fans costs $249.

2. Know who the fans are

“I’m from Chile and I own a .com business with a great number of visitors, so it would be very interesting to know who these people are and see their profile in order to improve our service and offers.”

Facebook’s latest demographic tools let you get a pretty good idea of how your fans are distributed demographically. You can now also target updates based on location and language. This technically should take care of the requirement to understand your fan. However, it is not as useful as being able to see each person and click through to their profile.

3. Get fans’ email addresses

“I have a Fan Page and would like to have just two pieces of data: Name and Email.

With this info, I would like to conduct an email campaign asking fans if they want to subscribe to my weekly newsletter.”

Not surprisingly many page owners want email addresses. Presumably this is to add them to an email list, or a customer database. Email is still the primary way to access customers, Facebook should make it easier for you to opt into giving your email address to a page owner, just as they do with apps.

If you’re a page owner there is no way to export or detect your fan’s emails. The only way to collect it is with a custom tab where you can ask the user to enter their email. It should be technically feasible to tie that email back to their Facebook profile, though I’m not sure if any tools out there do this.

I experimented with a few Facebook custom tab apps.

• Tabmaker has a very confusing user interface.
• Wildfire seems to be the most popular, and offers sweepstakes functionality.
• Venpop is simple and offers just the right features for free. I know the developers and sent video feedback.
• Lujure – another popular platform, I’ve met the founder and a lot of people love it.

There is a brand new Facebook feature that allows users to communicate with your page. If the user initiates, then you can respond. It would be a good idea to simply pin a post saying “message us with your email if you have any questions.” One app for managing this across multiple pages is contax.io.

4. Cross reference fans with a customer list or CRM.

“We’re trying to match FB profiles to profiles in our CRM via email address.”

When I first created my exporter, I wasn’t sure anyone would want it without the ability to get email. I quickly learned companies that have spent a lot of money advertising their page (or promoted it in an email campaign) want to know how many of their existing customers they’ve reached. Many times, name is sufficient to do the match (email is not required).

5. When did they become a fan?

“I work for the City of X, and we’re hosting a social media event to orient new students.  We’re giving away a Farmers Market gift certificate to students who like our page on the night of the event.”

One important piece of data that Facebook demographics leave out by not showing you who has fanned your page is who recently fanned your page. This is critical when organizing real-world events or ad campaigns.

If you’ve found solutions or workarounds to any of these problems, please leave a comment below. For updates on the Facebook exporter script, please sign up with your email at the top of this page.

I started playing CityVille so I could learn about the “game mechanics” behind the game. Sure enough, I got sucked in and started playing too much. So, I decided it was time to destroy my city.

Image by Abdallah ♫ via Flickr

I don’t understand how Facebook’s new Friend Connect is substantively different from their pre-platform API functionality. External Web sites already have the ability to allow users to sign in to Facebook and retrieve their friends and profile from an external site. Friend connect just appears to be some better UI controls for doing this withouth having to jump off to Facebook and approve the 3rd party app. What am I missing?

Image via Wikipedia

This is interesting, and certainly makes sense in the Facebook application world. Seems to me the Long Tail is already a prevalent concept in music though.

Prof. Elberse describes research showing that even in our cultural consumption we tend to be intensely social folks. We like experiencing the same things that other people are experiencing — and the mere fact that other people are experiencing and liking something makes us like it even more. Far from being cultural rugged individualists, most of us are only too happy to have others suggest to us what we’d like.

Portals – WSJ.com

Earlier this week I read about Zembly, a Sun “social” development project. One of the critiques against Zembly, is that it targets obscure app developers. I don’t see that as a problem for a development tool. Outfitters want to sell as many pick-axes as possible to gold searchers as possible?

Image via Wikipedia

The race between OpenSocial and the Facebook Platform is hard to call. Facebook has better technology, and a growing user base – but OpenSocial has the support of MySpace and LinkedIn.

A few weeks back, Google announced Friend Connect, and I don’t think it got the coverage it deserved. Maybe I was just on vacation. I think Friend Connect more than anything else gives OpenSocial a leg up. Friend Connect will let you turn any Web site into an OpenSocial Web site by adding some javascript. Facebook’s relase of fbOpen serves the same purpose, but will never be adopted as widely.

I was a big fan of MyBlogLog (the idea and virality at least, if not the implementation). I think Friend Connect is going to be what puts OpenSocial over the top. As if Google hadn’t taken over my life enough already.

This is my 10 minute presentation from last month’s Facebook developer garage. It gets off to a slow start due to some technical issues, but gets rolling 2 minutes in or so.

Video: Adam Loving – Instrumenting the Viral Loop

With less than eight hours to go, the team comes together one last time for the conclusion to Episode One of “A Startup A Week”. The concept of the show is to bring together top developers and designers, pitch them an idea for a startup, and give them just one week to take the idea from concept to reality.Today the team prepares for the final presentation to the head of the Seattle chapter of the non-profit Room to Read. Our team is building out a Facebook application that can use the viral power of the social graph to raise money for a computer lab in Cambodia.If you’re watching this video right now, chances are that you had access to a computer when you were a child – or your children have access today. In just five minutes, you can help be a part of a community that will share that gift with real children living in Cambodia right now.Here’s how:Click here to view the applicationDedicate a five dollar brick to a friend or loved oneShare the app with five of your friendsThe person at the top of the leaderboard at the end of the project will get to dedicate the school, and everyone who donates will receive updates on the progress of the lab.

It’s Thursday and the team has just one day remaining to complete their project for “A Startup A Week”. The concept of the show is to bring together a few rockstar developers and designers, pitch them an idea for a startup, and give them just one week to take the idea from concept to reality.

For the initial project of this series, our team is building out a Facebook application that can use the viral power of the social graph to raise money for a computer lab in Cambodia via the non-profit Room to Read. On this episode, our developer Adam Loving shows how he used LINQ and SQL Server to keep track of donations, our designer Jay Dokken of Design Commission gives us a very quick sneak preview of his awesome design, and Kyle Cressman sits down with our special guest Dominic Canterbury from D/C Strategic.

With less than 48 hours remaining, can our team come together and create a startup in a week? Stay tuned for the finale tomorrow, and be sure to check out the first three days of A Startup A Week – Episode One.

See what it takes to build a Facebook app.

We never captured on camera the “revolutionary change” I was asking for. Basically, the idea I came up with was to switch from asking for direct donations to going to an ad based model. Making that switch was too risky. We would have to come up with something that was so entertaining it would reach millions of people virally. We had thrown around some ideas on day one like “donate your favorite books.” However, facing the fact that it was Tuesday, I didn’t fight for a revolutionary change. I thought it would be enough to leverage Jay’s great design skills to create something that was beautiful to look at – and thus compel visitors to donate.