How to Track Your Favorite Pages on Facebook

There are generally two reasons why people fan pages on Facebook.

You love a particular product and by becoming a fan, you can show your appreciation for that product to the world. That is one of the reasons why I am a fan of Google, O'Reilly,Creative Commons, and a dozen other pages on Facebook. I also admire the work of people like David Pogue and Matt Mullenweg and hence have become a fan of them on Facebook as well.

The other popular reason why people become fans of Facebook pages is because they get access to official news updates, videos and even exclusive deals. For instance, if you become a fan of iTunes, you get to download some 20 songs for free. Bing uses their Facebook page to showcase new cashback offers while office supplier chain Staples uses Facebook to share coupons and upcoming deals.

The Problem with Facebook Pages

Facebook probably has millions of pages (anyone can create any number of pages) but you can use this link - facebook.com/pages – to browse through the entire list sorted by categories and popularity.

When you become a fan of any particular page on Facebook, the Facebook system will treat that page like one of your friends. That means any updates from the Facebook page will appear in your regular news feed and therefore the probability that you may miss seeing that important update becomes very high especially when you have a huge network of friends on Facebook.

The solution is however simple – you can either add your favorite Facebook pages to your browser bookmarks and make it a point to visit them once per day or, for something more simple, try the following services.

Track Facebook Pages via Email or RSS

One of my favorite services for tracking Facebook Pages is NutshellMail (they do twitterequally well).

You just have to link Facebook with NutshellMail using Facebook Connect (no need to share your password anywhere) and the service will send you a daily snapshot of Facebook pages that you are a fan of.

While it can track all your Facebook pages, it may be a good idea to select only a limited number of "important pages" for track else the daily email message can run into a few Megs because the email will have everything that's posted on the wall of that Facebook page. Founder Mark Schmulen told me that they are working on excluding "user" comments from the updates but that's not done yet.

If you like to track only "official" updates from Facebook pages and not the comments written by "fans", you should use the RSS option. Facebook now provide RSS feeds for all their pages that only include updates, videos, pictures, etc. posted the page admins.

For instance, the feed for Digital Inspiration page is available here. The URL will have a similar structure for all pages but for the page ID. You can subscribe to RSS updates in Google Reader or use a service like FeedMyInbox / FeedBlitz to get Facebook updates directly in your email inbox.