Either as a consumer that loves different brands or a B2B marketer who’s looking to connect with prospects, Facebook Fan pages offer an easy way to engage with others that have similar interests. It’s easy enough to find the brand names you know, but when looking using other criteria, it can be tough. There’s a lot of room for improvement in the way Facebook Fan pages are organized but here are several ways to find the business pages you might be looking for:
Fan Page List – This site aggregates information on Facebook Pages for Brands & Products, top Users as well as for Celebrities, Athletes, Politicians and other categories. Additionally, there are listings for top Twitter users and brands on FourSquare. It’s a cornucopia of social searching. It also has numerous sorting options for each category.
The Page Finder – This site is a user-generated index of Facebook Fan pages with about 1 million entries so far. Pages are organized by tags and locations, then sorted by popularity and alphabetically.
Discover Facebook Pages – This is an official Facebook Fan Page browser that will show pages organized by All, Music, Movies, Television, People, Brands & Products according to your geographic location. When you’re logged in to Facebook, it shows pages your friends like – as you would expect. I also noticed when you’re logged in, it shows two additional categories: Companies & OrganizationsLocal Businesses & Places.
Directory of Facebook Pages – Facebook also provides a directory of People, Apps, Groups and of course, Pages. The list is alphabetized so the A’s from AKON to A & B Doors are getting some nice exposure. When not logged in, a search for pages results in a list of users, not pages. You need to be logged in to Facebook to use the search engine within the directory and get Fan pages in the search results.
There are several other crowdsourced directories of Facebook Fan pages but I’ve chosen not to list them because of quantity and quality issues. Or because they were explicitly selling Facebook Fans.
For the most part, these tools will help you surface a variety of Business, Product and Brand Fan pages, but I think there’s a REAL opportunity here for something much better to come along. Who will it be?
If I’ve missed a quality and substantial Facebook Fan Page Directory, please mention it in the comments below. If it’s really good then I’ll add it to the list above.
