Now you can be a “fan” of Consumed on Facebook. Why? And what next?

I’m not exactly a power-user of Facebook. I have an account, and I have a little more than 100 “friends” there, and I do check the news feed once a day or so. But I’m not very active.

Even so, when Facebook announced the feature where brands or whatever could set up a page for “fans,” I immediately thought: I’ll make one for Murketing! But every time I pondered it, I couldn’t quite figure out what the point would be — besides naked self-promotion, of course.

But last night, I abruptly created a page for Consumed, my Times Magazine column. Should you be into this sort of thing, you can now declare yourself a “fan” of the column. It’s here.

Beyond that the page is presently rather threadbare, since I knocked it together and alerted most of my Facebook friends to its existence in approximately three minutes. (So far about 50 have declared their fandom.) Yes, I realize it’s sort of stupid to create a Facebook page and then try to come up with an after-the-fact reason for it to exist.

And here’s my primary reason for this post: Now that I have this page, what might I do there? What would be interesting, useful, or valuable to readers? Any ideas?

My secondary reason for this post is to explain — in the interest of “transparency” — why I did this. If anyone’s interested, that’s after the jump.

Clearly the answer is not because I suddenly thought of a good reason that having a Facebook page would really be useful to readers. Nor do I believe that this will actually be a particularly useful promotional tool for the column, though if turns out to be, I’ll be pleased.

Here’s what happened. One element of this Facebook feature is that once you’ve setup your brand page, you can advertise it on Facebook. (Actually, you can use Facebook’s “social advertising feature” to advertise anything you want.) Part of my curiosity at the time this was announced was whether that was effective. But before I had to think through whether I actually wanted to spend money to find out, a venture capitalist took the plunge. After a bit of a delay, his social ad did result in some clicks on the site he was, for the purpose of his experiment, promoting.

Not long after that I wrote a column for Fast Company — which should be out any day now, I guess — partly about people promoting themselves on Facebook. And I then sort of forgot about the whole thing for a while.

But meanwhile, I’ve got a book coming out later this year, and I’m trying to get over my fear of blatant self-promotion. Then, more recently, Online Fandom had a funny post about “trolling for fans.” A couple days after that I was looking at the news feed and saw that a friend of mine had declared his fandom for some public radio show that I’d never heard of.

For some reason, this gave me pause. It occurred to me that in the past year, there’s been both a book and a radio series that used the name Consumed. And it struck me just how annoyed I would be if someone else created a Consumed page — for one of those properties. Especially if I saw one of my friends becoming a fan of it.

So I made a page for my Consumed. (Or technically, for The New York Times‘ Consumed — it’s actually their mark, not mine. I guess it’s possible I could even get in trouble for having done this. Which would be funny.)

In other words, the whole thing was basically a defensive move.

Now, this is an incredibly backwards way to do things — to make a page and then try to think up something useful to put on it, and a good rationale for its existence. But what I’m telling you is how it happened. Now you know you why I’m asking for advice.

Got any?