The Student Leader Blog

Facebook Page or Facebook Group?

What's the best way to represent your student club/organization on Facebook?

Due to the number of questions received about this topic, I was about to write up my own analysis, but figured I should check with my blogging pals first. Sure enough Leigh Householder of Advergirl put together a nice post for businesses that is easily translated to Student Groups. Here is a full repost:

There are a lot of choices – groups, pages, causes, fans, friends. And, none of the which and the why seems terribly clear.

To make it simple: There is one main choice. And, then a few other important options.

First pick: Page or group or both

Page
Who can create it: An official representative of the real public figure, artist, brand or organization that the page is for

Why page?

•     First up, pages are indexed on Google. A nice little add to your integrated social SEO strategy
•     Allows you to connect with an unlimited number of fans (personal profiles & groups support up to 5000 friends)
•     You can send messages to all your fans
•     You can use rich media and leverage Facebook apps (super customizable)

Why not page?

•     Little of the new content or activity you post is actually fed to your profile new feeds (the most visible? New fans. New photos or video uploaded by fans)
•     Messages to fans don’t go into their inbox; rather, they’re delivered as an “update,” which fewer people see.
•     Unlike being an administrator of some non-FB communities (like blogs or wikis),there’s no automated way to moderate activity. You have to manually check for new links, videos, etc.

Group:
Who can create it: Anyone (on any topic)

Why groups?

•     Most importantly, you can message all members and the notice shows up right in their inbox for maximum attention
•     All activities are picked up in the feed – posts, discussion, photos, etc., which provides a lot more visibility
•     Tend to be more informal, which can, in itself, feel more social
•     Lots of control over who to involve. There are three different types of groups: Open (anyone can join); Closed (the group owner/admins have to approve all members); Secret (only the members and invitees know the group even exists).

Why not groups:

•     There’s a 5000 fan limit for messaging. More people can choose to be fans of your group, but you won’t be able to directly contact them
•     You can’t add apps directly to a group
•     Customization is limited
•     Unlike being an administrator of some non-FB communities (like blogs or wikis),there’s no automated way to moderate activity. You have to manually check for new links, videos, etc.
•     Word is, these groups are also very tricky to delete (Editor Comment - Only way to delete a group is to ask everyone to leave the group, then it just closes. There is no delete button)
  

Then add:

•     Fan: both these pages allow administrators to turn on a fan function. Allowing fans lets your organization rack up contacts (just like a personal profile allows you to add friends)
•     Cause: Want to raise money, enable supporters to raise money, win volunteers, etc? Facebook’s new action-based app is Causes. It’s a good add for a group or page strategy. But, because it requires users to add an application, it’s definitely not a standalone.

Quick update in response to an offline discussion:

Q: What's the difference between a profile and a page?
A: Short answer: a profile is for people; a page is for non-people (or super people, i.e. celebs). Profiles are the basic building blocks of FB. They represent its millions of members. In a longer answer, I'd also tell you that pages allow a lot more customization and flexibility ... but, I think this whole person vs. nonperson thing gives you the talking point most people need.

When there is poop on your party.

Today was one of the bestest brainstorming sessions ever. My coworker and I started with a few vague ideas on staff fun-days and an hour later had two pages worth of actionable plans and enthusiasm levels so high that I was actually jumping up and down throughout half the conversation.

And then came the poop.

When we presented our ideas to one of the executives at the office, our shining eyes and glowing smiles were basically met with: "Meh. I don't think that anyone's going to go for it."

Of course, it stung. But that's not the topic of this post. I'm interested in thinking about the pooped upon rather than the pooper. What does one do in that situation? Give up? Complain? Rebel?

It's perfectly possible (maybe even likely) that she was right--maybe no one will want to participate in the events we had planned for the staff. Or maybe she's wrong, and everyone will burst with excitement as soon as we announce our ideas. Or maybe it's a little of both and what we need to acknowledge is that our ideas may first be received with ambivalence or even a few "boos" and rotten vegetables, so we need to find the right way to build enthusiasm and get people on board.

Like Megan said in her post--as student leaders, we develop ideas that are supposed to aid students in enjoying college. Well maybe they just don't know what will make them enjoy college more and they are suspicious and skeptical (as people tend to be these days). If that's the case, then we, the pooped upon, should see lackluster participation as a sign that we should be putting more effort into the "marketing." We've got to grow enthusiasm (while receiving and incorporating feedback).

So there. I'm sticking to my plans, damn it.

Facebook is more Popular than Student Email

There's been talk for awhile now about college students not checking e-mail, instead preferring new technology like text messaging and Facebook.

Schools, in an understandably institutional response often now "require" students to check their email, making the process not exciting to the students by calling it "official". I really do have sympathy for the institutions, especially the poor community college that has been fighting for 3 years to get the budgeting to get a .edu e-mail, finally gets one for 2 million, only to find students used it to get a Facebook account and now don't check their .edu at all, because they get all the info they think they need by logging into Facebook everyday.

While big rich universities like PSU can afford to live on the edge of technology, the bell curve of schools is being left behind by the spam filters of students.

Gen Y, or C, depending on who you are reading, is bombarded with media. (Just think of advertising on the 1/2 inch strip of trim above the glass backboards with www.godaddy.com on them.) They have had to erect incredible powerful filtration methods to sort through all the "junk" that comes at them all day.

E-mail as a mechanism, to a Gen-Yer, and to anyone that hasn't figured out their spam filter yet, is more junk that good. Too much Viagra, sales pitches, "send this to ten people or else . . " Students are simply de-emphasizing this channel in proportion to its usefulness to them.

It's hard to keep up with their preferences, for sure, but it's very silly for institutions to try to force them to use a channel that students have reviewed and dismissed. The students are simply making optimization choices for their inputs. They are making smart choices based on their experiences. Schools will not convince them they are wrong with policies, at best they will cow the students and thereby reinforce and "out of touch" reputation.

Students like text messaging and Facebook precisely for the reasons institutions struggle with them - they are hard to Spam. Of course institutions don't see their communications as Spam, neither does Coke or Expedia, but in the aggregate all of the messages that are not immediately relevant tick one point negative in the student's minds. With Facebook, and incidentally, screwing this up is why myspace will continue to degenerate, students get messages that come from pre-filtered sources: their friends. Same goes for text messages, though now spam is starting to creep into this medium too.

The start of an answer for schools is too work on relevancy. They must do the hard work of pre-filtering their communications and try to get it to the right students at the right time.  Regardless of what channel the message goes through, if institutions lazily bomb out mass e-mails, this generation will simply tune them out with the other junk. Of course this is extra hard for schools with no technology, it is always easy to "send all".

My personal opinion is that PSU has it right.  I think RSS feeds are the way to go. This is a scalable system and is free (sign up for a free typepad account and then feedburn it and you've got an RSS feed). The only challenge is that RSS feeder adoption rates are not yet high enough to make it work (in fact they are extremely low). Institutions could require these instead of -e-mail however, and avoid looking silly by spending money on ineffective channels or requiring outmoded technologies. Instead the risk is on RSS adoption in general, but at least this experiment doesn't put the IT department out 2 million. Very importantly, RSS gives the students a Spam free info channel allowing the institution to show off its understanding of the current challenges of its most important stake holders.

Clipart/Stock Photos = Cheap

vs.        vs.

No matter how cute the clipart puppy is, if it's on a piece of marketing material for an event, it screams cheap. Many schools use clipart because they think it's the only free way to use images. Not really true. The web has many great resources for you and your student leaders to get free, high quality images that you can use for your marketing. Here's a brief list:

• Sxc.hu is the largest free photo site on the web with millions of images. I use this one all the time as my main source.



• Stockvault.net has over 8,000 royalty free photos for personal and education projects.



• Openstockphotography.org is a search engine that goes through all of the Wikimedia Commons images, which as of April 2007 was over 1.3 million.



• Flickr.com is run by Yahoo and has millions of photos uploaded by amature photographers from around the world. The trick with Flickr is each photo has a different set of copyright settings attached to it, so you'll want to read about Creative Commons before you grab the photo you love.

Here's to happy photo finding and better looking marketing materials for campus events.