Facebook Fan Page Helps or Hurts
Odds are, if an organization has a Web site, they probably also have a Facebook Fan page. Even College Newsroom has one.
But for college newspapers, a facebook fan page can create a forum where comments may be less about stories and more about attacking writers, staff members or spreading rumors.
Does a Facebook fan page work to bring more readers to your Web site? Should college papers have them?
How does one moderate comments, if at all?
Any examples of well used Facebook fan pages?
About Kelsey Schnell, Creative Developer
Kelsey is the Creative Developer of College Newsroom and former Editor in Chief of the Ferris State Torch at Ferris State University. Currently he works at a marketing and PR firm in metro-Detroit. He is not good at picking up subtle hints or heavy objects. Visit Kelsey's personal site, www.kelseyschnell.com
6 Responses
Our Facebook fan page is an absolutely essential part of our brand and product. It makes perfect sense to reach students exactly where they are: Facebook. Everytime I walk past an open lab, at least 90% of the screens are logged into the site. I can’t imagine how many students regularly make a habit of refreshing our Web site from time to time, and posting articles on our fan page is a great way to capture their attention with something they may find interesting. If not, they’ll just skip it on their newsfeed like any other boring post.
facebook.com/saginaw
We haven’t had to deal with abusive comments on our Facebook. Great tool.
Excellent. Thanks for the feedback.
Do you link it with Twitter as well?
We have a Facebook Fan Page although we just recently started it. We seem to have some trouble getting the students to visit and comment, but the couple of comments that we have received have been positive. We’re hoping to start up a Twitter soon too. I think these tools are incredibly helpful, especially for a college newspaper.
Lookout: have you considered linking your fan page via RSS to your site? This would pull stories in and provide a large amount of content to your Facebook followers.
Also, it doesn’t hurt to spam your friends with messages like “Join our fan page!” and include the link ;) As bad as it sounds, sometimes to get known in social media, you have to “spam” a little. But, once the ball is rolling, it should show up in your friends’ news-feeds (assuming they become fans), and others will hopefully gain interest from there.
Just an idea :)
We’ve fully implemented our Facebook and Twitter pages within our Web site. We have links on our primary navigation menu to both pages, as well as a Facebook “window” that displays a link to our page and the number of fans we have.
We’ve also linked our Twitter and Facebook pages with each other, so that when we post an item on Facebook, it displays on our Twitter feed automatically. (This has also caused us to make sure we have a brief description with each link, because on the Twitter feed, it will only display a tinyURL link if there is no description, and many of our followers like to get a preview of what they’re about to click.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.