Facebook Advertising

January 11, 2012 2:22 PM

I've volunteered to set up and run the Facebook page for a student social organization. I was looking for suggestions on how to best manage a Facebook presence. The page would mainly be focused in advertising events that the group will be hosting, as well as recruiting new members.
posted by codacorolla to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Best answer: My best advice is to make sure there are a few people who have admin rights, the ability to post things and respond to things, otherwise it becomes a bit of a personal albatross. I'd try to have a few focused things you want to do, with a decently narrow scope, and try that for a month and see how it goes. So something like

- Will post links to events within facebook's events module [include photos, relevant details, invite people you think will want to go and encourage sharing, etc]
- Get enough likes to get a custom URL [this is like 25 or something? it's not a very big number]
- Publicize/promote the page itself once there is a custom URL
- Cross-link to other relevant organizations on facebook
- Put up photos of events to promote other events [make sure you have the OK of people appearing in the photos]

The big thing is to have the page not just seem like codacorolla's page, but the organization's page. Do this for a month, keep getting the word out, assess how you think it's going and what else you might want to do. I help maintain the facebook page for our local library and I have one for my book. There are some nice little tools that you can use to know who is looking at your stuff and etc which might be useful further down the line [if you're a group that gets funded somewhat based on metrics] but otherwise I'd just make sure you're doing what you set out to do, that you have some policies on hand with the group for how to deal with "trouble" [people being spammy, people being obnoxious] that you all agree on and that you are all more or less in agreement on what the page is for. You can start slow and experiment before people even really know there is a page there so I'd just get started.
posted by jessamyn at 5:14 PM on January 11, 2012 [3 favorites]

Jessamyn's advice is sound.

Also, make sure that you set up a "page" and not a profile.

To start, convince all your FB friends to "like" the page, and also see if you can get them to comment/like posts. FB is sortof a self-fulfilling prophecy - the more active your page is, the more popular/shared your page will be, which means that more people will see it and more people will be active on it.
posted by radioamy at 7:31 AM on January 12, 2012

Thirding Jessamyn's advice. I started my page with zero "fans" and now have 18,000. If there's any advice I have, it's "don't announce, engage."

Good luck.
posted by Short Attention Sp at 5:30 PM on January 12, 2012