This is the first guest post by awesome nonprofit social media rockstar John Haydon. John will be providing tactical tips here on SocialFishing on a monthly basis. Can.Not.Wait. Whoo hoo!
You’re curious how a Facebook Group can compliment your Page. Or, you may have a Group and want to “move your fans” over to your Facebook Page.
Many nonprofits find Facebook confusing so don’t get down on yourself if you are lost.
Pages, Groups and Profiles
Facebook created Pages, Groups and Profiles – three separate applications – to help individuals and organizations achieve three separate goals:
- Create a presence for a business, brand or non-profit on Facebook (Facebook Pages).
- Organize a group of people around a common issue or interest (Facebook Groups).
- Create a home base on the web for individuals to express themselves and connect with others (Facebook Profiles).
Facebook Pages vs. Facebook Groups
We know that profiles are for individuals, but what’s the difference between Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups?
Facebook Pages
Facebook Pages are used to promote businesses, non-profits, celebrities and artists to Facebook users.
Facebook states that “only the official representative of an artist, business, or brand may create a Facebook Page.” In other words, Pages are intended to be an “official” web page for your organization on Facebook.
- Facebook Pages are indexed in search engines – increasing the likelihood of folks finding your organization through a Google search.
- A Page can have multiple administrators. This lightens the workload of maintaining a page (groups also allow for multiple admins).
- Analyze Traffic. Facebook Pages allows you to capture essential stats on Facebook fans.
- There are no limits to the number of fans you can have on a page.
- But, you need at least 25 fans to create a custom URL.
- Sending updates to all your fans at once is quick and easy. And fans receiving those messages can easily forward the message OR post the message to their Facebook Wall.
- Updates and wall posts can be targeted to specific subsets of Facebook fans.
Tips For Using Facebook Pages:
- You can add Facebook Applications like Video or Static FBML to enhance the experiences fans have with your Facebook Page (Groups don’t offer this option).
- Since each tab has its own URL, you can choose any of them as the landing Page for off-site promotion. You can also choose which tab to set as the default when users find your Facebook Page.
- Work your status! A frequently updated status with useful and interesting content keeps fans coming back.
- Pages now have the same multimedia functionality as the Wall tab on a user Profile – encourage posting!
- Encourage fans to “share” Notes or Photos with their friends or post to their Profile.
- Using the notes application, you can import an RSS feed to drive more traffic to your blog.
- Using Static FBML, you can include an email web form to capture subscribers.
Facebook Groups
Facebook Groups can be created by anyone interested in promoting and organizing people around a specific interests or cause. All members of a group have the ability to contribute content that appears on the Group’s wall – photos, videos, discussion threads.
- Active participation: Because members of the group actively contribute content and participate in informal but meaningful discussions, they are more likely to keep coming back.
- Groups come in three flavors: Open (anyone can join), Closed (group admin approves requests to join) and Secret (Only members and those invited know that the group exists).You can change the flavor of your group at anytime.
- Warning: Secret Groups don’t allow you to send a second event invitation to the same person.
Tips For Using Facebook Groups:
- The Group name should make people want to join. Which name would make you join: “Let’s talk to Coca Cola about saving the World’s children” or “ColaLife“?
- Invite your raving fans to start a discussion on the group (you know who these people are, right?). They’ll feel a sense of pride and will likely invite new people to join the group.
- Upload photos and videos – encourage members to post these to their profile so that their friends can easily join the group.
What Facebook tip would you add?
Come experiment with us! A bunch of bloggers/trouble makers in the association community who could not attend ASAE’s Great Ideas Conference are meeting up by Tinychat today to talk about all the learning we’re missing out on. Here are the details:
#Ideas10 Chat for Virtual Attendees
TODAY! at 1:15 ET (11:15 MT)
Here’s what we’re planning to talk about:
- our experience as virtual attendees (or remote attendees, as @jeffhurt likes to say)
- great tweets, resources, and content we’ve seen come out of the conference
- how well TinyChat works as a tool for virtual attendees (yeah…it’ll come up.)
So far, we’ve confirmed that Leslie White (@ltwhite), KiKi L’Italien (@kikilitalien), Elizabeth Baranik (@elizabethb), and I will all be on video. There’s also a text chat feature, so you can still participate even if you’re having a bad hair day. We also hope to have a report from some of our pals who will be on-site at #ideas10. Pretty sure Maddie’s in.
Part of the reason for this experiment is an ongoing discussion that’s been filtering through our community about extending face-t0-face learning experiences to online audiences–using good eLearning fundamentals, of course. It came up in last Tuesday’s #AssnChat on Twitter and it’s a big theme in the Engage365 community. There were also some important lessons that came out of #Untech10–turns out extending the learning doesn’t have to take so long to plan, or be so expensive to implement. Heck–Tony Veroeven Ustreamed an #Untech10 breakout session from his iPhone. Other than needing to charge his phone afterward, it worked pretty well.
So come join us. This is experiential learning at its best (or worst…don’t want to over-promise here. Haha!)
So Jamie scooped me, but yes, we will be presenting our session on Truth and Authenticity in the Digital Age at ASAE’s Great Ideas conference today (Monday) at 3 pm (Colorado time).
Here’s the presentation – we’re testing out Prezi.com for this, which is a format which melds mind-mapping with presentations – in other words instead of going slide by slide in order, you set a navigation path which can go in any direction, can zoom out to show the big picture and zoom in to highlight tiny details. It was a totally awesome experience putting this together and I hope it works well when we actually present it. Lindy and I have lots of ideas for prezis for our forthcoming speaking gigs…
My other session will be tomorrow (Tuesday) at 2 pm Colorado time:
What is a Social Media Manager?
What does it take for an association to become a social media success? The first generation of association “social media managers” are starting to find out—and create their own definitions of what such success looks like in the process.
For this one, I’m going to stick Maggie McGary (from ASHA) and Todd Carpenter (form NAR) and anyone else in the room who does social media work for their associations in the fishbowl and ask them to tell us all about how they manage this work internally. Should be awesomesauce.
For both sessions, and all the other good stuff going on, please follow the #ideas10 hashtag. I will surely be tweeting from whatever sessions I am in (I never pick in advance, btw, I like to go with the flow) and I also plan to test out my new Qik video streaming account… we shall see! If I do take some videos either live or posted later you’ll know through the #ideas10 hashtag, and I’ll post here on the blog with a run-down of all the great ideas we all come up with. Watch this space!
(photo credit)
Please join us for our Water Cooler chats, hosted in conjunction with Engage365, on FRIDAYS at 12 pm CST/1 pm EST [NOTE NEW EARLIER TIME]. That’s today!! We’ll be talking a lot about all the various interesting issues around using social media at events… but as usual, we’ll also talk about anything else that’s on your mind. So come armed with serious questions / topics / issues / problems or just drop in to shoot the breeze on Friday afternoons. Can’t wait to chat with you!
Last week, we hosted our first chat in conjunction with Kiki L’Italien’s Delcor Social Media Sweetspot, the weekly video chat on the latest association social media news which starts at 12:30 EST – click here to watch. (Here’s last week’s recording.) I was so excited to have the chance to talk to Kiki about lessons learned from unTech. We had a great video chat, with Reggie Henry of ASAE lurking and giggling at us in the background, and continued talking on the Water Cooler afterwards.
I’ll be hanging out with Kiki on Sweetspot once a month to talk about associations, social media and events specifically. (I say “I” as opposed to “we”, only because Lindy has declared herself to be camera-shy. But that may change, I’m working on it!) I’m excited to see what scoop Kiki hears across the social web about what associations are up to in this space.
Please note that we’ll be sticking to this new time (12:30 pm for SweetSpot and 1 pm EST for the Water Cooler Chat) from now on, so that everyone knows Friday lunchtime is “awesome association social media chat” time!
Join us today!
I can’t resist posting a link to this truly awesome guest post by marketer Susan Baier on my new favorite blog Convince and Convert.
Setting aside for a minute her first sentence about relevance (natch), Susan’s post goes through various ways in which the company ThinkGeek connects with their core audience.
According to Jamie Grove, the company’s Director of Evil Schemes and Nefarious Plans (i.e. Marketing), ThinkGeek is “all about serving our community. Our social media activities live in our customer retention sphere, not customer acquisition – because the minute it’s in customer acquisition, it changes the nature of the conversation.”
Read the post and see what you think. I love her descriptions of how the company “acts human”, engages rather than sells, and “speaks their customers’ language”. Despite it being about a consumer products company, the post really resonated with me because all of our associations are made up of a membership with particular quirks. I used to work for an association for psychoanalysts – we used to joke (kindly) among staff about how the members were smart as hell and could really debate and work through issues, but man, they took forever to come to any decisions. I hear stories all the time about “my members” and what they are like. “You know, they are engineers. They like rules.” LOL! But read through Susan’s post, and see if that doesn’t make you think of ways you could use social media to speak your own members’ language.
BONUS: along similar lines, Mashable points to 5 Fantastic Facebook Fan Page Ideas to Learn From.
