New changes at facebook were announced today.

Today, Facebook Ads launched with three parts: a way for businesses to build pages on Facebook to connect with their audiences; an ad system that facilitates the spread of brand messages virally through Facebook Social Ads™; and an interface to gather insights into people’s activity on Facebook that marketers care about.

Politicians and facebook have been around for a while now and a politician on facebook is a strange animal. While they are people they don’t mess with their profiles. With the advent of new facebook pages a politician can now fit in a little better.

So far Barack Obama has the first facebook page that I have found

The new pages look like a profile/group hybrid. They are designed for companies to have a facebook presence and gather fans, the ability to do a mass mailing to all your fans, as well as way to integrate targeted facebook ads.For a politician on a grand scale i.e. presidential elections this will have an impact but on a smaller local scale I think pages will have a tremendous effect.A county commissioner can set up a facebook page, gather supporter and also run targeted facebook ads to just the conservatives in his town above the age of 18. Think google ads combined with a facebook page for your politician/business with targeting down to, age, sex, region, keywords etc.To bad it was released after the Nov 6th election cycle, it would have been fun to test out.

Those are my half formed thoughts after messing with pages for an hour so put on your thinking caps and discuss how this can help us techrepublicans.

IMHO - it's going to be BIG