Introduction: Facebook As a Community Building Tool
Facebook is a social media platform used by millions of people worldwide. People use this service for many reasons including photo sharing, keeping in touch with friends and family, and following Facebook Pages for groups that they are interested in. An example of these groups can include bands, companies, or a university that the user belongs to. Creating a Page is very easy and can be done by anyone with a Facebook account. Once set up, Facebook Pages can have a wide variety of uses. A company may want to advertise an upcoming conference that they are hosting or promote a contest that they are currently running. Likewise, universities and colleges may also want to use Facebook Pages to promote themselves. For example, they may want to advertise themselves to increase college membership or to remind faculty and students about upcoming events.
Although it may seem difficult to create and manage a successful Facebook Page for your institution, it can be done in four easy steps. First of all, an institutional Facebook account needs to be created and setup, which can be done at www.facebook.com. This step can involve adding photos and managing who can post to the institution’s Page. Next, the Page needs to be managed by posting regularly and inviting new users to join it. Common topics for these posts can include the institution’s upcoming conferences or a contest that they are hosting. Thirdly, there are many methods that you can use to improve your Facebook experience. Some of these methods can include sharing posts you find interesting, using Facebook Messenger to stay in contact with users that follow your institution’s Page, and clearing your timeline by hiding posts that you do not want to read. Finally, another great resource to improve your Facebook Page is to read other applicable Instructables. These can give you insight into topics such as Facebook ads and Facebook Analytics.
Step 1: How to Set Up Your Institutional Facebook
Before you can set up a Facebook page for your institution, you must first make sure that you have a personal Facebook account from which you can manage your new page.
Create a Page
Go to the Create a Page section on Facebook and select which type of institution that you want to make a page for. Then, to create the page, simply fill in all of the required information regarding your institution.
Add Profile and Cover Photos
Your profile and cover photos will play a large part in the initial impression that viewers will have of your institution. If you are unsure of which pictures to use, a good guideline is to make your profile picture the institution’s logo and the cover photo a picture of the institution’s building or campus.
Add a Page Description
Make sure to add a description of your institution. Facebook recommends a simple 1-2 sentence entry to help people better understand what you offer.
Add Privacy Settings
You can limit both who can view your page and who can post to it within the settings. It may be a good idea for more prestigious institutions such as colleges or academic journals to disallow others to post onto their page. This makes it so that you are in control of what kind of content your page is producing.
Checkpoint
Now that you know how to create a page for your institution, you are ready to work on improving the appeal and efficacy of it by learning to manage it well.
Step 2: How to Manage Your Institutional Facebook Account.
Once you have set up your Facebook page, actively managing it will allow you to get the most out of it. This involves making posts, managing friends and managing comments.
Posting
You will want to make regular posts on your page in order to keep your followers up to date with the latest that your institution has to offer. For example, you should make posts about upcoming events and opportunities such as conferences, contests, scholarships, bursaries, etc.
Adding and Managing Friends
A quick, simple way to introduce more traffic to your page is by inviting people to it that you think may find it useful. This is made easy to do with a dedicated widget that contains all of the contacts from the personal account associated with the page, coupled with an invite button.
Adding and Managing Comments
You can change the order that your comments are displayed in by changing the Comment Ranking setting. This lets you decide whether the most recent comments are listed first, or instead, the ones with the most likes and replies. The latter is likely the preferable choice, as these comments will often be the most interesting and will promote others to engage in your content.
Checkpoint
Now that you know how to effectively manage your page, you are ready to learn some more advanced tips, which will help you to make your Facebook experience great.
Step 3: Tips to Make Your Make Your Facebook Experience Great
Make your timeline attractive
Since Facebook has launched its timeline feature, it has made the profile look like a colourful scrapbook.You can share pictures of any events or activities that you were a part of on your timeline. Moreover, you can tag your friends and colleagues in those photos and can also add destinations where those pictures were taken.
Don’t feel shy to share
You can share your friendship with any of your friends on your Facebook page. In addition, you can also add video alongside your friendship which will contain memorable photographs of you and your friends together. Facebook lets you share vast amount of information, it can be an interesting news, a science article, a music video,or a recipe to cook something etc. You can also share the any page that you like, for instance if you are working for a community, you can share that community’s page.
The biggest advantage that this sharing aspect provides is that, it promotes whatever you are sharing amongst your connections. Therefore, it can be used to promote the events, conferences and memberships etc.
Make use of Facebook Messenger
Messenger is a free of cost application available to all Facebook users. By using the messenger you can stay in touch with your colleagues, your friends and all other close ones. You can do text messaging, video calling and even group video calling. Moreover, you can also share any important documents or forms amongst your group.
Hopefully, now you have some idea of how to make your Facebook experience great and if you want to learn more, just follow step 4.
Step 4: Learn More
Now that you have learned about how to setup and manage your institutional Facebook account and also how to make your Facebook experience great, I hope that you will make use of all this information to your advantage.
Below are the links to some other instructables that you might find useful