Facebook Fan Page Helps or Hurts

by Kelsey Schnell, Creative Developer In: New Media | , Published: Feb 3, 2010

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?

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About Kelsey Schnell, Creative Developer

Kelsey is the Creative Developer of College Newsroom and Editor in Chief of the Ferris State Torch at Ferris State University. A senior majoring in Business Administration, Kelsey spends his free time taking his dog, Horton, for long walks. He's not good at picking up subtle hints or heavy objects.
 
 

6 Responses

  1. Michael Westendorf says:
    February 5, 2010 at 2:03 am

    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

  2. Mark Bauer says:
    February 7, 2010 at 2:03 am

    We haven’t had to deal with abu­sive com­ments on our Face­book. Great tool.

  3. Kelsey Schnell, Creative Developer says:
    February 8, 2010 at 12:23 pm

    Excel­lent. Thanks for the feedback.

    Do you link it with Twit­ter as well?

  4. The Lookout says:
    February 8, 2010 at 6:47 pm

    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.

  5. Brandon Martinez, Web Development says:
    February 9, 2010 at 6:22 am

    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 :)

  6. Michael Westendorf says:
    February 9, 2010 at 12:49 pm

    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.

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