Become a Fan of Facebook Pages With a Text Message

This is potentially huge news for brands that are using Facebook Pages. You can now promote your Page using text messaging – or rather, by simply asking people to text the name of your page (www.facebook.com/yourname) - to Facebook’s shortcode, 32665, to become fans.

For example, text “fan Mashable ()” to 32665 (which spells out ‘FBOOK’ on your phone) and you become a Mashable Facebook fan.

The feature appears to be very beta, and hasn’t been enabled for every Page admin yet. An additional caveat seems to be that for Fans to successfully opt-in, they need to have setup their mobile phone to receive texts from Facebook (), which can be done from your Settings page. Unfortunately, T-Mobile isn’t on Facebook’s list of supported carriers, meaning I currently get an “access denied” error when trying to Fan stuff via text (most other major carriers are supported, however).

The blog Buzz Marketing Daily, who seems to have first noticed the new option, explains the possibilities: “Imagine the scenarios- you can ask 10 people in a Board room to take their phone out and become Fans, or 100 people at a rally to become political supporters, or 30,000 people at a concert or ballpark to become fans via mobile device.”

Likewise, you could also include that very simple prompt in all of your company’s marketing – brochures, commercials, print ads, websites, etc, as well as encourage your current Twitter () followers to become Facebook fans, which, Facebook would surely love for you to do. Twitter already does the same thing on its service by letting you text “follow [username]” to their short code – 40404.

Assuming this feature eventually goes live for everyone, we think it will have a huge impact on increasing brands’ following on Facebook. We’re certainly excited about getting this feature enabled on our Facebook Page, and will likely be integrating it into our own marketing going forward