Focus on Facebook - the theme of the month at the betterplace lab
I like Facebook. So do 500 million other people. And since no other website has such a large gathering of people, organizations, nonprofits and businesses are now trying to come into the fold to reach as many of those people as possible.
This month, we are testing out the best ways for a nonprofit to estalish a successful presence on Facebook. The lab is open, and the guinnea pig is the lab itself. Last month, we not only blogged about our tips and strategies for using Twitter, but we applied the methods as well. We're going to do the same thing now for our Facebook-Experiment, and we will measure the outcomes at the end of the month.
We've already prepared some basic things for our experiment. The first question an organization faces when deciding to join Facebook is: Page or Group? It's good to know the difference between both formats beforehand.
Group or Fanpage?
- Group: With a group page, you can send out newsletters, as long as the group has less than 5,000 members. However, it is not possible to use applications for external programs (such as Twitter or MailChimp) and you also don't have access to the behavior-information of your group members.
- Fanpage: A fanpage does not allow you to send out a newsletter, but your status updates show up on the walls of your fans. You can use applications and Facebook sends you updates about the user-behaviors of your fanpage (more on this later).
Recently, I've received updates from groups to which I belonged that say "We're moving from a group to a fanpage -- please like us!" It seems like it's not just a trend but a benefit to move to a fanpage. In the group pages, a member cannot choose not to receive the newsletter, and the extra, unwished-for mail can sometimes be irritating. The status updates from fanpages are a better fit to the non-committal, quick character of Facebook, while still effectively keeping contact with the community members. At the same time, it is much less scary to "like" a page than to join a group as a member. The betterplace lab has a fanpage on Facebook.
Pimp my Facebook - with external programs
One of the first applications that we installed on our facebook fanpage was pagemodo. This software allows one to create a welcome landing-page which users first see when they go to your fanpage. Various versions of pagemodo, based on price, allow for The landing page should tell what you do, why you do it, and a call to action for your fans. Our call to action is in a box in the middle of our page, and we think it could be even more prominent. However, we used a free version of pagemodo. Keep in mind to make your message and call to action clear on your landing page.
We are using the free version of pagemodo, but a few Euros of investment allows you to place a video of your organization directly on the landing page. Videos help greatly with the participation and interest of others (watch Chris Anderson's TED lecture on this topic), and you should consider having one about your organization. This can be done with relatively little effort (here are a few tips from our FLIP film contest).
If you decide not to use a video on your landing page, you can still use the Video tab on your fanpage. That's where we've put our videos, which introduce the betterplace lab team and mission (in German). The benefit of doing this rather than sharing links to YouTube is that your video is directly uploaded and shown in your Facebook page. Posting YouTube links on your wall means that they will eventually move further and further down in the list of posts.
You should also pay attention to use the "Info" and "Photos" tabs on your fanpage to present information about your work and organization. We've also integrated a MailChimp application "Email Signup" tab, which coordinates with our email newsletter program so that users can sign up for email updates. (You can sign up too!)
This is the current stand of our Facebook fanpage. Our next Facebook article will look the best practice of wall posts: how, when and what. Our goal is to have more than our current 525 fans at the end of the month, many more "monthly active users" and also to learn what all of that actually means.
(Translated by Becky Crook)
