Facebook: Getting On

Editor's Notes

• #2: This part of the series will cover the basics of getting on Facebook: (a) Why Use Facebook? • what is Facebook • what purpose can it serve (b) Why Use a Facebook Page (Fan Page/Nonprofit Page) • what about groups • what about profiles • what about causes (c) How to Set-up a Facebook Page • what's your purpose • what are your goals (d) What to do/expect
• #3: The why start with a 'what', but let's quickly make sure everyone is on the same page. Social networks, nee social media are currently changing the world. This can be a scary thing to watch what you know, slip away into a great big unknown. From radio to television to journalism; from government to education and to the nonprofit/service sectors; the chaos and acclimation is happening rapidly and we're in the midst. Sure you want to 'batten down the hatches', but now is the time to stay open and explore what works and what could be beneficial, because the changes aren't over.
• #4: Social media is this morass of new tools, ideas, and methods for communication and collaboration. It's changing the reliance on old infrastructures like newspapers, television, and even organizations in general. From blogs, podcasts, message boards, micro-blogging, lifestreams, etc. people are no longer waitin for organizations to organize them. They are communicating, collaborating, and contributing amongst themselves. And Facebook is just one medium for organizations to enter into the world where the conversations are happening.
• #5: People are using Facebook to instantly collaborate, share information, and have conversations about ideas and cause they care about. (paraphrasing Beth Kanter) Facebook is the tool, it can provide you the building blocks to grow your core audience, create new networks for communication, and allow you to interact with individuals your organization has possible never had access to.
• #6: Why is this important? The upsides… Your website is vital in many ways—an introduction to your organization, your organization’s service, campaigns, fundraising, etc. People expect to find information about your organization on the web, and you can control that information with a web page. Your website is the ideal place to collect and cultivate, but your outreach is just a tad limited. With over 300 million users, of which over 120 million of log-in to the site daily; the audience available via Facebook is the largest potential audience your organization may ever have access to. While college and just out of college age is still the largest demographic, the growth of the 35-54yr old population is rapid, and the over 55 crowd has been hitting record highs.
• #7: Why is this important? The upsides… Your website is vital in many ways—an introduction to your organization, your organization’s service, campaigns, fundraising, etc. People expect to find information about your organization on the web, and you can control that information with a web page. Your website is the ideal place to collect and cultivate, but your outreach is just a tad limited. With over 300 million users, of which over 120 million of log-in to the site daily; the audience available via Facebook is the largest potential audience your organization may ever have access to. While college and just out of college age is still the largest demographic, the growth of the 35-54yr old population is rapid, and the over 55 crowd has been hitting record highs.
• #8: Why is this important? The upsides… Your website is vital in many ways—an introduction to your organization, your organization’s service, campaigns, fundraising, etc. People expect to find information about your organization on the web, and you can control that information with a web page. Your website is the ideal place to collect and cultivate, but your outreach is just a tad limited. With over 300 million users, of which over 120 million of log-in to the site daily; the audience available via Facebook is the largest potential audience your organization may ever have access to. While college and just out of college age is still the largest demographic, the growth of the 35-54yr old population is rapid, and the over 55 crowd has been hitting record highs.
• #9: Why is this important? The upsides… Your website is vital in many ways—an introduction to your organization, your organization’s service, campaigns, fundraising, etc. People expect to find information about your organization on the web, and you can control that information with a web page. Your website is the ideal place to collect and cultivate, but your outreach is just a tad limited. With over 300 million users, of which over 120 million of log-in to the site daily; the audience available via Facebook is the largest potential audience your organization may ever have access to. While college and just out of college age is still the largest demographic, the growth of the 35-54yr old population is rapid, and the over 55 crowd has been hitting record highs.
• #10: Why is this important? The downsides… Facebook is not a benediction. It will not save your organization or provide your with miraculous amounts of funds. Lets ponder that a moment. Facebook can be incredibly beneficial to your organization, but it will require effort and a little hardwork. And this will be aided if you have an idea or strategy or at the very least some goals you wish to accomplish. We want you on Facebook, but we don't and you don't need another abandoned house.
• #11: Personally, I believe any goals for your Facebook Page are good. If you have no idea what you want, and are just testing the waters, then you can set random goals (but the still need to be reasonable). For example, I could say I want 500 fans. If I'm a small local nonprofit, that goal would be unreasonable if I gave myself a 2 month time limit, but maybe accomplished if I gave myself a one or two year time frame. Remember, the type of organization you are can be of help or hinderance as well. Animals and children track well, as well as longterm social justice issues like—clean water, hunger, poverty, child abuse, or even domestic violence. But your neighborhood outreach program target runaway and throw-away youth to use clean needles and reduce HIV infection, may require a bit more effort, and a lot of natural enthusiasm.
• #12: Personally, I believe any goals for your Facebook Page are good. If you have no idea what you want, and are just testing the waters, then you can set random goals (but the still need to be reasonable). For example, I could say I want 500 fans. If I'm a small local nonprofit, that goal would be unreasonable if I gave myself a 2 month time limit, but maybe accomplished if I gave myself a one or two year time frame. Remember, the type of organization you are can be of help or hinderance as well. Animals and children track well, as well as longterm social justice issues like—clean water, hunger, poverty, child abuse, or even domestic violence. But your neighborhood outreach program target runaway and throw-away youth to use clean needles and reduce HIV infection, may require a bit more effort, and a lot of natural enthusiasm.
• #13: Personally, I believe any goals for your Facebook Page are good. If you have no idea what you want, and are just testing the waters, then you can set random goals (but the still need to be reasonable). For example, I could say I want 500 fans. If I'm a small local nonprofit, that goal would be unreasonable if I gave myself a 2 month time limit, but maybe accomplished if I gave myself a one or two year time frame. Remember, the type of organization you are can be of help or hinderance as well. Animals and children track well, as well as longterm social justice issues like—clean water, hunger, poverty, child abuse, or even domestic violence. But your neighborhood outreach program target runaway and throw-away youth to use clean needles and reduce HIV infection, may require a bit more effort, and a lot of natural enthusiasm.
• #14: Personally, I believe any goals for your Facebook Page are good. If you have no idea what you want, and are just testing the waters, then you can set random goals (but the still need to be reasonable). For example, I could say I want 500 fans. If I'm a small local nonprofit, that goal would be unreasonable if I gave myself a 2 month time limit, but maybe accomplished if I gave myself a one or two year time frame. Remember, the type of organization you are can be of help or hinderance as well. Animals and children track well, as well as longterm social justice issues like—clean water, hunger, poverty, child abuse, or even domestic violence. But your neighborhood outreach program target runaway and throw-away youth to use clean needles and reduce HIV infection, may require a bit more effort, and a lot of natural enthusiasm.
• #15: Personally, I believe any goals for your Facebook Page are good. If you have no idea what you want, and are just testing the waters, then you can set random goals (but the still need to be reasonable). For example, I could say I want 500 fans. If I'm a small local nonprofit, that goal would be unreasonable if I gave myself a 2 month time limit, but maybe accomplished if I gave myself a one or two year time frame. Remember, the type of organization you are can be of help or hinderance as well. Animals and children track well, as well as longterm social justice issues like—clean water, hunger, poverty, child abuse, or even domestic violence. But your neighborhood outreach program target runaway and throw-away youth to use clean needles and reduce HIV infection, may require a bit more effort, and a lot of natural enthusiasm.
• #16: Sure you don't have a lot of time, you possible have little energy, and your enthusiasm may wax and wane. But treat your Fan Page like your an explorer. You're getting to know the lay of the land. There are no absolutes. We'll discuss content a little more later, under the set-up section. But I can't emphasize enough, to expect the unexpected. Your fans maybe far removed from your traditional audience, so don't expect to treat them the same. Be open, be enthusiastic, become an explorer. If you absolutely, just can't be then don't create a Fan Page or identify secondary administrators as rapidly as possible, and let them handle ongoing communications for you. This can and will create a dichotomy between your conversations and your organizations communications, but that's not always bad. Ideally, they would have started to diverge over the first few months anyway. If not, then you're probably doing it wrong.
• #18: Questions and confusion about the differences between Facebook’s Profiles, Causes, Fan Pages, and Groups abound. The primary being which of these might best suit a nonprofit’s social-networking plan. Let's remove two from your immediate consideration. Profiles are personal, always!!! Some organizations do use personal profiles for their organization, but the risk is that if someone flags your profile or Facebook somehow comes across it, its a clear violation of the terms of service and can be deleted. Which means all your energy and effort would have to be rebuilt. So you can have your profile, other staff and volunteers can have theirs, but don't turn those into your organizations profile. Use a page. Causes, causes compliment a Page, Group, or Activity. They're not so much an either or, as oppose to a should I add.
• #23: Obviously Facebook is very good at using the Fan Page. They’ve created Nonprofits on Facebook which provides lots of tips, tricks, highlights, and general information about happenings in the nonprofit sector.
• #24: A personal favorite is the One Campaign. One uses a custom tab as a landing page to promote joining their mailing list. But also provide a nice mix of updates. The do have an unfair advantage of having a number of stars speaking on their behalf.
• #25: (Red) is a good example of a Fan Page that doesn’t use the >Nonprofit type under >Brands and Products. While your nonprofit may be best served under the category nonprofit, a number aren’t or may require multiple pages. For a local example, see the Goodman Community Center. IronWorks uses the page type > Cafe; their Food Pantry uses the type > other business. And I’ll assume, that once they set-up a general page, for the Community Center at large it maybe a brand > nonprofit, but could easily fall in a number of other categories as well.
• #26: Stanford University offers a great mix of useful information to students and faculty, to just random pieces of info and fun items of benefit to the community at large. They firmly separate their posts from their fans, but have an active and engage fan base who post videos, photos, links and more.
• #27: Tips for Setting Up Your Fan Page Keep your page name short and accurate, can't change after you create it There is a day or two lag for it shows up in search Content is lifeblood of your page Start with information tab: be complete, accurate, and honest Fan Page backend is like a cms and if you know a little HTML you can do some spiffy stuff Not all applications are optimized for pages, visit the app page to check All pages require ADMIN - designated FB profile - for security reasons because they want a real person Admin are not public - add multiple admins - invite by email or FB - always have multiples as a precaution so you don't loose access to the page.  Standard best practice Wall Tab - accuracy updates of information.  "Write Something" lets you post rich content" More interactive content is better - the Wall is a history of interactive Worst thing you can do with a page is dump an RSS feed into the Page - won't be as successful When you make updates to the Page, it appears in the streams of your fans or people who have joined your page.  This is very powerful viral marketing When you start to write in the "write something" you get options to add links, photos, videos - post things that are beyond promotion content. Be interactive, make it interesting, provide behind the scenes content.  Incorporate events into your page.  "Exclusive content is good" Shed the tradition PR schtick content and make it real. Red Cross Fan Page is a great example.  So is One Campaign and Stanford University. Lexicon on Facebook lets you track words and phrases
• #29: Regardless of how you start, growing your audience will eventually become a part of your purpose. It maybe primary or secondary, but it will be there. Having a fan page with 10 fans is not the final goal of anyone I can think of. So take some of the tips here to get you started on this goal…
• #30: People engage more with your page, when your page has a personality. Don't just post press releases or website updates. Post things that interest you as a representative of your organization. Fun things, engaging things, controversial things. Get people commenting or liking your links, and start building from there.
• #31: Pictures, video, and links reveal things about your organization and your organizations personality. Snap shots of folks at the office, or from events. If your office has someone who loves to talk, have them make videos. Link to YouTube video you like. Don't stress yourself thinking I need to find things people will find interesting. Just find things that you find interesting and share them. Have other staff or volunteers help so the pressures defused. Don't make it a painful job, make it a job that you enjoy.
• #32: So your thinking. I don't have the time for daily. That's fine. This is why a good starting approach is connecting an RSS feed from your website to your Facebook page is a good idea. If your website gets updated daily or a few times per week, then so does your Fan Pages. All you need to do is provide the personal touches— insights into your organization, insights outside of your organization, and the fun stuff— links, photos, videos, etc. Also remember to respond to comments. This lets people know your engaged, listening to them, and willing to communicate with them.
• #33: Just a quick way to say, no matter how quirky your personality, if you find something interesting, someone, somewhere in the world will also. Hopefully, they are a friend or a fan.