10 Ways to Make Your Facebook Page Sing: I- Stamats Higher Education Marketing Blog

Oct 30th 09 Posted by Fritz McDonald in Featured Articles, Strategic Creative

10 Ways to Make Your Facebook Page Sing: I

Sure, let’s just get on Facebook—everyone else is, and besides, it’s where our students are, right? You’ve probably heard this more times than you can count…you might even agree with it. As the age of social media dawns on college campuses, institutions are jumping on the biggest, most prominent social site because it looks easy to do and it’s free…isn’t it? I’ve talked about the myth of social media costs before and won’t bore you again with it here, but you should always remember that these things require resources in the form of someone-has-to-do-it and that someone usually costs something.

And we could argue all day about whether your students are actually on Facebook and if they will respond. Today, I want to focus on doing Facebook right. The truth is that it’s harder than it looks and requires strategy…or at least some forethought. The team behind the Stanford Facebook page did as much—with 43,962 fans as of this writing it’s one of the top five institutional Facebook pages according to Datamark. So, in the spirit of their accomplishment, here are 10 tips that should help you get your institutional Facebook page up, running smoothly, and building an effective and productive community:

1. Choose the “pages” option over the “groups” option: Despite somewhat limited interactivity, pages allow you to use Facebook applications and mini-feeds to drive virality—your page will show up on your fans’ profiles, which provides another strong traffic driver. You can also use Flash or HTML now and customize much easier. Above all, pages are ideal for presenting your institutional brand because of their focus—for communicating with more people instead of becoming friends with all of them, fan pages are ideal.

2. Use/hire a community manager: This is a full-time position, whether you use an intern or create a job. This person oversees your network, monitors activity, helps it grow by sparking conversation, inviting new members, and nurturing an environment in which members can create and share content, and more.

3. Seed content on your page: This is the Stanford approach and many others are falling in line. Seeding content is a way of planting certain kinds of content that will generate discussion, reaction, and user involvement. Stanford uses wall posts to seed content, and the posts are run again in the Highlights column. One ongoing post, the Open Office Hours series, features select professors talking about their research in short videos with built-in comments features that enable students to ask questions and get answers at a later livecast.

4. Use a launch group to seed content: This is a group whose sole responsibility is to become community members and create content to attract other members. Find a mix of students, faculty, staff, and alums who are already strong content creators—a small group of influencers can have a big impact.

5. Keep content relevant: Don’t limit content to your traditional marketing stuff—students are looking for authenticity, so don’t be afraid to show them things you wouldn’t have thought of using for marketing a few years ago…like lectures.

6. Keep content fresh: Make sure your content launch group is seeding fresh content on a regular basis. Your community manager should be looking for ways to inspire conversation: polls, quizzes, memos, questions, etc.

7. Work on a content schedule: Too little presence is as bad as too much. To gauge how often your seeders should be seeding and your manager should be inspiring, build a publishing schedule based on what you see happening on the page.

8. Hold events: Use the page to drive traffic to real events—such as admissions events—as well as Facebook events.

9. Broadcast special information to fans only: Give non-fans different info. This requires a hack (you didn’t hear me say that) that can be found here along with credit for this tip . Huge thank you to Steve Coulson!

10. Link to everything that matters to you: a It’s the best way to drive traffic and keep it moving from your institutional site, blogs, partner/association/alliance sites…and most important of all, to all those pre-existing, unofficial pages started by your students and alums. Instead of walling them out, invite them in—this is a great way to bring together these communities.

This link is a really good resource.

What great things are you doing with your institutional Facebook page?

Source:

“Stanford University’s Facebook Profile is one of the Most Popular University Pages,” Inside Facebook.com, 5/18/09

Photo by: Jacob Botter

http://www.thoughtsonemail.com Rob S.

Seeding content is the secret sauce to creating activity and *community* in online communities.

The other tips are mostly on-point, too, though I would suggest that Facebook Groups can be more useful than Facebook Pages in *some* instances, depending on the goals.

Strategy and goals go hand in hand, of course!
http://unhub.com/patrickboegel Patrick Boegel

Good stuff, but in regards to point number 1 Groups have recently been upgraded to have the same features as pages, their are currently some differences in how items will interact between groups and peoples individual timelines in terms of creating discovery or spontaneous “fans” or “requests to become members” but it likely going to change for the better.

Also both pages and groups are found in individuals profiles, right now the latter is a list in the info tab of the profile but that is very likely to change in the near future.
http://blog.stamats.com/ Fritz McDonald

Thanks Rob…it seems like Patrick has settled the groups vs. pages challenge…and thanks Patrick for bringing it to light. I love the way Facebook keeps evolving to truly meet user/community needs. Of course, the whole Open Graph thing could make ‘pages’ a thing of the past and quickly. I appreciate you both chiming in–it’s always good to hear from people who know what they’re talking about.
Dan W

Thanks for this post. I would say that even though facebook has improved the format of the group, the page is still vastly superior. A group will not show up in someone’s updates or inform members of an event (withoug hastling them with a private invite)I am an administrator of both a group and a page and although we decided not to delete our group because it still offers a viable “touch” I primarily use the page to communicate and attract interest.
http://highedwebmarketing.wordpress.com Paul Redfern

I would add that you need to integrate social media into your traditional communications plans as well. It needs to be a part of the conversation.
http://blog.stamats.com/ Fritz McDonald

Good insights, Dan…I’m curious…would it be possible to drive some traffic from the page to other groups? Are you doing that? I get asked a lot about that….and nicely put Paul. Any tips you’d like to share about how to integrate? This is also a huge issue for everyone.

And thanks to both of you!
http://www.thoughtsonemail.com Rob S.

Pages do have some benefits, Insights being notable among them.

One could argue semantics, that belonging to a group has a different connotation than being a fan of a Page.

As for events, if the events are relevant and not overly frequent, messaging the group with info about the event can be beneficial, anyhow. Push marketing can obviously be very effective.

Groups do hold one significant trump card over pages if this is a need/goal (as it is for my needs in some cases): a group can be private. As far as I know, pages cannot be private. Sometimes exclusivity can be beneficial.
http://blog.stamats.com/ Fritz McDonald

I like the connotative difference you point out between pages and groups Rob. They are different entities, different kinds of spaces. You’re right–a group can be private and page cannot; although it can more or less lock people out who are not fans, at least from participating. In an ideal world, a page would drive users to groups, allowing them to move from a general to a specific population. That’s why building good relationships with non-official institutional groups–such as those started by alums–is a good idea. Thanks for the good thinking, Rob.
http://highedwebmarketing.wordpress.com Paul Redfern

I think the first step when you talk about integration is getting all (or at least) more members of your PR/communications staff comfortable with the technology. They have to use it in order to take advantage of it. Also you have to be willing to fail. Not every thing you do will be a huge success. Learn from it and move on.
http://blog.stamats.com/ Fritz McDonald

Good point, Paul. What kinds of things are you doing to educate your staff?