What makes one Facebook page better than another one? Is it the nature or the tone of their content?
Here are two facebook pages about the same thing:
What makes one better than the other?
The Snopes.com page simply reports the news. They repost the blog and keep the content flowing. It’s interesting stuff, but nothing too fantastic. The twice-as-popular “checking snopes.com before forwarding dumb e-mails” page does things differently. They get personal. They don’t attack people, but they do write in a more casual way. The posts are written in the first-person. They add opinions. They tell you what they think and feel.
The “talking about this” stat is proportionately larger on the “checking…” page than the Snopes.com page, and one could say that the page title itself is the draw.
Interestingly enough, of all my friends on facebook, only 8 are fans of the “checking snopes.com before forwarding dumb e-mails” and only 4 are fans of the snopes.com page. That’s a small sample, but even there, the twice-as-effective idea comes through. It is of course obvious, every time I look in my news feed and find fantastical and obvious hoaxes shared as fact, that about 900 people I know, do not pay attention to Snopes either way.