Maggie McGary writes for the SocialFish: An Insiders View from the Trenches.

I’m still recovering from brain overload at Great Ideas–too many great ideas and great conversations crammed into too few days. I thought the conference was awesome overall, and was impressed at the number of people whose associations are either already implementing or getting ready to implement some kind of social media activities. There seemed to be a lot of people going the white label route, and I felt at times that my friend Lynn Morton and I seemed to be the only ones touting the merits of Facebook.

I personally think that there are merits to both white label networks and public ones, and don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. Especially now that Hitwise has pronounced Facebook to be the most popular U.S. website, surpassing even Google, with over 400 million users, I don’t think associations should ignore Facebook.

Don’t agree? Here are three things you can do with a Facebook page that could make the effort well worth your while:

1. Extend the reach of your job board–it’s not news to anyone that social media has altered the tried-and-true job board model that many associations have banked on for years. Now that recruiters can post jobs for free on any number of Facebook pages, Linkedin groups and countless other places, they may be less likely to want to pay to post jobs on your association’s job board. What if you were able to take your job board and stick it where recruiters want to be–your association’s page on Facebook? You can. You can create a custom tab or, as in ASHA’s case, your job board vendor can create a Facebook application that displays your job feed. Now fans of your page can browse current jobs right from Facebook.
2. Target fans with Facebook ads–not only can you use Facebook ads to target fans of your page, you can target friends of fans. This is a unique opportunity available only to Facebook page admins. So what, you ask? What if you could offer your advertisers or corporate partners the opportunity to advertise not only on your website but to your association’s fans on Facebook? Think they’d be interested?
3. Turn your fans into activists–now it’s possible to turn your fans into activists right from Facebook with the “Actions” application. You can add this customized tab to your association’s Facebook page and fans can instantly send messages to elected officials then use the “tell-a-friend” feature to get friends to do the same. The application automatically matches them with the correct officials based on their profile information, and allows you to capture registrations in an external database.

Your turn: what cool stuff have you done with your association’s Facebook page?

(photo credit)