I was one of the privileged few that drew up chairs for the FB4good event, upstairs at a private members’ club just off Goodge Street on Thursday. Richard Allan, Head of European Policy at Facebook, introduced the event with the aim of ‘setting up conversations and relationships.’ He then went on to give a few stats on Facebook usage - with 150 million mobile users on Facebook globally and with Sunderland as the most ‘Facebooked’ city in the UK. Ho’way the lads.
His introduction gave the early indication of a running theme, that ‘wired’ internet access was being increasingly outstripped out by mobile methods of internet access.
First Speaker - Randi Zuckerberg, Head of Consumer Marketing, Facebook
5 years ago, the self proclaimed ‘grandma of Facebook’ got a call from her brother Mark to come and join her on an interesting project he was working on. 5 years down the line and Randi Zuckerberg is getting told that yesterday she said ‘awesome’ too much in a seminar on Facebook with the Foreign Office. This was most probably a more relaxed atmosphere and Randi confirmed her passion for working with non-profits and the exciting advances that social-movements have already achieved independently through Facebook.
She listed one of the earliest signs of community activism after the Virginia Tech tragedy in April 2007, with users from colleges across the USA adopting a black ribbon with the University logo over it to show their support. This community feel has been ongoing and every time a user from a new country wants to access Facebook, they are offered the chance to translate it to their native language. This has led to new languages on Facebook being translated by volunteers within 24 to 48 hours each time. I wonder who volunteered to do pirate…
Randi Zuckerberg then introduced the first piece of editorial that had put onto the Facebook homepage of their users. It was for the 2008 US Election and had a map with the call to action: “Today is election day - go vote!” The following inauguration of President Obama was streamed on CNN with a Facebook integration allowing users around the world to comment, 50% of the comments received were from visitors outside the USA.
Randi Zuckerberg- “We feel strongly that we have a responsibility to encourage people to get involved in politics”
This was then carried across to the UK election, with a counter of who had voted and a list of your friends that had already made a pledge to vote. A Facebook Fan Page called Democracy UK was also set up and went from 0 to 300,000 fans in just a couple of weeks.
Using Facebook for good was evident again with a Global Disaster Relief page set up to draw attention to great causes and activism by over 500,000 Facebook users. The strong community pull of social media and Facebook can sometimes distract from the real world in extreme cases though, such as the girls who fell down a storm drain in Australia and instead of calling for help, updated their Facebook status…
Randi Zuckerberg- “In social media, users expect that people are listening - they are looking for interaction.”
And this brings me on to Randi Zuckerberg’s top 10 tips for non-profits on Facebook.
- Create a public Facebook page. This allows for a vanity URL, multiple Administrators, a welcome tab and it creates a home for your content.
- Customise your Facebook page. There are tools available to make it look like a user is landing on your homepage so keep branding the same and use the social space to attract news users.
- Come up with Rules of Engagement. Who will post on the page? Should each post have an image? How many posts per day? Should you post questions, statements or press releases?
- Encourage community interaction. Give people a reason to talk and form a community.
- Be authentic. Users are much more likely to respond if you are open and approachable as an organisation.
- Get immediate feedback. Set up some real-time Q&A sessions with your users to let them know you value their input and time.
- Leverage the power of video. Use live video feeds and video responses to questions your users pose - this will give them a shared ownership in the content on your page.
- Get creative with Facebook features. Use the new groups feature to create private conversations with your most valued users and activists.
- Make it go viral. Facebook shares and newsfeeds are great for getting your message out virally. Tag people at events you hold, take photos at the offline events and encourage users to come back the next day and tag themselves.
- Use Facebook insights to guide decisions. You can get a lot of information on who users your page and responds to updates through the insights tool.
An extra tip for non-profits on Facebook came through the Q&A session that followed. If you have only just started the group or have less than 300 members then you need to grow your fan base to the ‘tipping’ point which is around 350 members. Then you can use the tips above to continue growing your fan base.
Remember when you are starting out that quality of interaction with your members is far more important than quantity. This is something I’ll come on to in the following blog posts from the event. You can get more great tips from the Facebook Non Profits page. If you want more info on best practice with your Facebook page then there’s loads of info here: Facebook pages.
