Why did you change the facebook page?

From: Luis

Comments: Why did you change the facebook page? Was it to stop all the negative comments? I guess we know the Condors don’t want fans to interact with each other.

Reply: Luis, I think you’re overreacting a little. You can still interact. You can still be negative if you really want. You can still post comments. Nothing we did changed that. All we did was set up our page like the LA Kings or the Dodgers do.

As much as the Condors facebook page is meant to be an outlet for fan interaction, it’s also intended to provide unique team-related content to everyone – such as post-game highlight videos, interviews with players and coaches, videoboard features and other fun stuff. We have over 9,000 fans on our page. What if 1/100th of them went on in the next hour and posted something? It would be impossible to find anything!

To be honest, many of the fan comments that people would post on our page were a bit repetitious. We have been asked when Scott Freeman was coming back about 30 times in the last month. We have answered that question tons of times, but because so many people could post other more frivolous things on our Wall, like asking what the score of the game is, such important information kept getting pushed way down or even off the page, and nobody would see it. We also had to monitor the page for spam, and were deleting posts every day. These were the obstacles for the old set up.

The fact is, right before we made the change, only three of the 18 most recent Wall postings were put up by us. Less than half of them had a single comment and only 11 of them even had a “like”. To only have 20-35 “likes” out of our top 18 Wall postings tells us that not many people “liked” what was happening on our facebook page. Clearly, We HAD to change it.

I will say the major drawback to this setup is that it’s difficult now for fans to post cool pics they have either taken at games, or at events with players. We’ve had some great submissions, but again, some people would post 10 pics at a time, all on separate posts, and you would have to scroll down for 5 minutes to see anything else. We would love to still incorporate some of that. Perhaps we will post a Fan Pic of the Week or Video Link of the Day… and we can post cool pics that fans send to us at condors@BakersfieldCondors.com. Maybe we will come up with more ideas along those lines that fans enjoy. Player chats. Submit a question-type stuff.

Hope that makes sense, Luis. Sometimes change is a good thing. We’ll see, I guess!

-The Mailbag Guy