This is the third part of series on being active in social media without spending a lot of time or money. To catch up on previous installments, please browse our archives.
To wrap up the series I want to touch on Facebook Pages. Pages are kind of like standard Facebook profiles, except instead of centering around people they center around companies, brands, and organizations. A page can have a message wall, photos, discussions, events, and other types of information depending on what Facebook apps you’ve installed (if you’ve ever played an online Facebook game like Farmville or participated in a survey or quiz on Facebook, you’ve used an app).
People can follow activity on your page by becoming a “fan.” When you post status messages to your page, they show up in your fans’ news feeds. This makes pages great for sending out information to people who may want to keep up-to-speed on what you’re doing. As mentioned in our posts about Twitter, we use TwitterFeed to automatically post links to new content in our blog.
Facebook also provides Groups. The Kansas Coaching Project and SIM Professional Developers have groups on Facebook. Unlike pages, status messages posted to groups are only viewable within the group, kind of like a Facebook-within-Facebook.
Groups and pages have overlapping features, which may be confusing. Tech blog Mashable has posted a good comparison of the two features’ capabilities to help you determine which may be best for you. They have also published the Facebook Guidebook online to help you get the most out of the largest social networking service out there. For us, KU (strongly) suggests using Pages instead of Groups.
Of all our social media presences, we probably reach the fewest via Facebook, even though many of whom I consider our core audience (SIM professional developers and the teachers with whom they work) use the service. We’ll promote our Facebook presence more heavily in the coming months, but generally speaking this is a good example of why it’s a good idea to push your message across multiple platforms, and let people choose the best way(s) to access your content.
This concludes, for now, our series on social media on a shoestring. As may be evident from this post, our approach is by no means complete. As the social media landscape adapts, we’ll have to do that same. Will newer technologies like Google Buzz take off? What–if anything?–will trump Facebook as the king of them all? If you’re waiting around for the dust to settle you’re in for a long wait.
I hope this series has inspired you to take another look at social media and how it can help you promote your ideas and causes without taking over your life. Even though I’m wrapping up the series for now, keep an eye on our blog for social media-related news and tips. Thanks for reading!
From last week: Facebook, phishing, Depot tags, and more productive e-mail | Stratepedia Blog | March 15th, 2010
[...] On Tuesday, I wrapped up (for now, anyway) my series on shoestring social media by looking at how we manage our Facebook page. [...]