❤ Facebook Pages to Watch

Welcome to the world of social media! Facebook has now launched yet another annoying privacy-intrusive function.

Facebook is apparently testing a new way for page owners to keep tabs on competing pages. We received an invite from facebook about a week ago on our West Indian Skincare facebook page to try the new “Pages to Watch” this is a new module which allows people to select five pages. Facebook will then bookmark these pages in this module, and give updates about like totals over the past week. When an admin selects pages, they can then see how many new fans those pages have added/subtracted over the past week. There are no deeper metrics available right now, beyond likes. It’s being touted as a way to “track the progress on any Pages you want to watch. You’ll see how many likes they get and receive tips on how to keep up.”

.

So the first time we received our invite to try this new module we immediately turned it down as we found this to be very intrusive.

However, as days progressed we were notified by Facebook that other pages have added us as their 'Page To Watch' line up. The notification also invites us to add our 5 pages to start using 'Pages To watch' (because as I said above, we didn't add any pages to our 5 )

As a business who has already been viciously copied by wannabe competition this really pisses us off. Now they get to stalk us with convenient tools! Well done Facebook!!!

At the very least there should be a privacy option so we can decide what information other pages can get to monitor about us. 

I understand this is a Win/Win for Facebook, after all Facebook's intent is to get you to add all your industry competitors so it can compare you side-by-side and coax you into buying advertisements when you fall behind. I also understand that Facebook isn't giving you anything you couldn't calculate by hand if you REALLY wanted to – This is just making it much easier. But it just seems like somewhat of a violation of trust to be arbitrarily releasing page insights to anyone who wants to see them, granted this is just a tiny piece of data but still it's the general principle.

One good thing that has come out of this new feature, we realized we have indeed made a mark in our industry. No matter how slow or fast we are proceeding we have made quite an impression as we have been amazed at the number of pages that has decided to 'Watch' our page. If we didn't no one would be 'watching' us.

Do you know who's watching you?