Facebook Pages and Government: Best Practices
With Facebook’s recent re-design comes many new opportunities to use the network’s pages application. For those not familiar, Facebook pages are generally used to promote things like bands, blogs and yes, government agencies
The Pages now have statuses, much like profiles have for some time. For more on what’s new, click here.
These changes create new opportunities to interact with constituents. If a Facebook page is setup properly, constituents will be able to “become a part of the conversation.” It also has the potential to drive extra traffic to agency Web sites and blogs.
But the new pages are also more demanding. In order to make your page successful, it will need a lot of “babysitting.” This can create a problem for agencies that do not have the time, money and resources to monitor Facebook. Structural issues exist too: out of security and productivity concerns, many agencies block social networking sites like Facebook. This issue has been identified as a barrier by the Federal Web Managers Council.
Issues aside, let’s look at some best practices!
- Make your status updates human. Remember, people are reading these interspersed with the updates from family and friends. You don’t want to stand with robotic sounding or boring updates. Treat it like you would treat a tweet; the Facebook stream is very similar to the Twitter timeline. Take a look at our best practices for Twitter for more on that. Good example: WMATA, the folks who bring you Metrorail, Metrobus and MetroAccess in D.C., Maryland and Virginia.
- Give constituents a reason to visit your page. Post photos and videos that are exclusive to Facebook. Encourage conversation by soliciting questions. A successful Facebook page is much more than an extension of your Web site. For many, your Facebook page has the potential to be their portal to your agency. Treat it that way!
- Don’t overload it though! Being bombarded with information is bad. Clutter is bad. Not being able to keep up is bad. Therefore, limit your new content to a handful of items/status updates per day. Once again, remember that people do see this in their streams. If they’re annoyed by constantly seeing items from your page, they’ll un-fan you. Obviously, that’s not what you want to happen. Unfortunately, the City of Rockville, Md., went a little trigger-happy when they added events to their Facebook page. When you load the page, all you see is events in the stream. Keep your audience demographics in mind when adding content (which is readily available to all page admins) to avoid excess clutter. I don’t think many Facebook users would be interested in attending the Rockville Seniors Inc. meeting.
- Send your users to the wall first. Your wall is the hub of activity on the page. Facebook gives you the option to specifiy which “tab” users go to when they first click your page. Involving as many people in the discussions and exposing them to the freshest content at the earliest possible opportunity is definitely a plus.
- Easy on the Applications. Applications cause clutter, confusion and oftentimes have questionable origins (and security). However, one application to consider adding your page is the Static FBML application, developed by Facebook, which allows you to create static items within your page. It does come in handy.
With the new pages concept in its infancy, it was hard to find examples. This post will be updated as more and more agencies (hopefully) embrace the power of the new Facebook! Good luck, and keep us posted with anything cool you find!
Thanks to @Campariman for the idea. Also, Social Government’s Facebook page is a work in progress and will soon be updated using these best practices!
