Facebook have already removed the no-search option, which means anyone can find a person's profile (including stalkers). Stuff hidden from your timeline page can still appear in search results and other parts of facebook. You can 'restrict' messages, which means you still receive everything but some of it gets diverted into a separate folder, and you can only restrict friends requests to friends-of-friends. In short, facebook's recent changes to make life easier for their dataminers means there's very little a person can do to stop a stalker without leaving the site.
My personal concern with pages is that it's only a matter of time before facebook continues along its pro-datamining anti-anonymous path decides it wants everyone to know which profile is running the page. When that happens I'm going to have to make a decision about whether I want my employers and relatives to know my pen name, and I'm pretty certain the answer to that is going to be 'no'.
Not that there's a lot of point to maintaining one anyway. I went from about 1/5 of my followers seeing posts to 1/20 earlier this year, and now it's hit or miss as to whether the posts turn up in my own profile feed. Time sensitive stuff seems to be the worst at appearing, though maybe I'm just more aware of the fact that "competition closes tonight" posts takes three days to appear compared with the 'adorable pandas' posts. I did managed to hit a keyword someone else had paid to promote the other day, which shot the views right up. I'm sure they loved that their money was helping promote my page!
Honestly, the harder facebook push people to use pages, the more businesses are going to drop the site. It's just not cost effective to pay to promote every post just to reach people who've actively stated they want to see it. And in the meantime, they're hurting users who genuinely want to support the site but can't use their own name (or have a name facebook doesn't recognise).
My personal concern with pages is that it's only a matter of time before facebook continues along its pro-datamining anti-anonymous path decides it wants everyone to know which profile is running the page. When that happens I'm going to have to make a decision about whether I want my employers and relatives to know my pen name, and I'm pretty certain the answer to that is going to be 'no'.
Not that there's a lot of point to maintaining one anyway. I went from about 1/5 of my followers seeing posts to 1/20 earlier this year, and now it's hit or miss as to whether the posts turn up in my own profile feed. Time sensitive stuff seems to be the worst at appearing, though maybe I'm just more aware of the fact that "competition closes tonight" posts takes three days to appear compared with the 'adorable pandas' posts. I did managed to hit a keyword someone else had paid to promote the other day, which shot the views right up. I'm sure they loved that their money was helping promote my page!
Honestly, the harder facebook push people to use pages, the more businesses are going to drop the site. It's just not cost effective to pay to promote every post just to reach people who've actively stated they want to see it. And in the meantime, they're hurting users who genuinely want to support the site but can't use their own name (or have a name facebook doesn't recognise).
