I just got an e-mail from a client who's pretty upset. He'd spent months building a large fan base on a page. He did everything right and had nearly 100,000 fans on his page. He figured it was time to start cashing in. So he began placing links in his status updates. He found that he got a pretty poor response from those links, so he increased the frequency with which he was updating. The response got worse. What he eventually found was that every single time he dropped a link into his page, more of his fans were either leaving (un-liking) the page or, more frequently, hiding it from their news feeds. So all that time and effort is now lost. His mistake? The stuff he was advertising was in no way relevant to the page itself. The key to monetizing a Facebook page effectively is to advertise products or services that really appeal to the fan base of the page. And if you can do it without it looking like advertisement, all the better. People don't get on to Facebook to be sold anything. They get onto Facebook to have fun and interact with friends. All this requires is a little thought and research. Before you set up and build a fan base, have a plan in place for how you're going to monetize it. Don't ever let your advertisements overshadow the primary content of your site. And make sure that whatever you're advertising is going to add value to your user's experience. My client will be OK. He's going to start rebuilding his fan base. I'm doing some fresh custom FBML for him to give him a great new landing page. But his lesson was costly. Months of work and he's hidden from over half his fans. He'll have to work hard to get them back or replace them. All because he didn't take a little time and plan for how to effectively monetize his page without offending his fans and losing his one big asset. Anyway, just some free and totally unsolicited advice from someone who does this for a living. Take it or leave it.
No, it means you should use some common sense and advertise things related to the page and not spam your users.
The main goal is to interact with your fans but not to SPAM them. You shouldn't advertise your products but help them. So your fans should be a targeted niche and you will get success with Facebook.
You can do both if you think it out and do it right. For example, I have a network of small town (very rural) local pages. Those pages cover local news that goes unnoticed by area newspapers and television. I have an admin or two who actually lives in the town and delivers the news. Then I sell advertising to area businesses. Every news story includes a link to a local business. People appreciate the coverage they get from these pages because local issues and events don't get covered anywhere else. And because they appreciate the coverage, they reward the advertisers by clicking on their links and taking advantage of the offers presented. The entire plan was developed with advertising revenue in mind. It works. It's inoffensive because people expect advertising with their news. The point is that there are plenty of people who are building fan pages who don't have a product or service of their own. They may not even have a website. But they can monetize their pages if they do it in a smart way and make sure that the advertising doesn't come off as spam, but actually adds value to the content of the page itself. It's really all about common sense and a little forethought. Mostly this was a cautionary tale for those many, many readers here who seem to be wanting to sell ads on their fan pages. Once they start selling advertising to the highest bidder without regard for whether or not the advertiser is a good fit for their audience, they're very likely to lose that audience. Facebook is a very powerful marketing tool, but you have to use it wisely or you won't get nearly the results you expect.
An example of what hes saying would be, if you have a cafeworld page, try monetizing with offers involving cooking.
I know from personal experience, getting loads of spam links in big capital letters thrown in my face from fan statues is very annoying and will usually result in an unlike or a hide.
I know of a page that behaved like this, and yes, they did lose all their fans in a week. The page started up on quite a jokey subject, and the posts on the wall and the comments that followed were quite witty. Then suddenly every post from the admin was to a completely unrelated affiliate offer. The language of the previous fans complaints turned the air blue! And still the admin didn't have the sense to stop, so the vast majority of the fans posted a few deserved cuss words, then unfollowed.
I'm not asking or telling. I know how to monetize pages. I do it for a living. I just wanted to pass along a little warning that just starting to throw ads out on a page once it has a fan base without any thought as to whether or not the ads are relevant to the content of the page and without some care to make sure that they don't substantially detract from the value of the non-ad content of the page is a fast way to go from a large and growing page to a quickly dying one.