A Town’s Facebook Page Builds New Community
Yesterday, I wrote about Twitter, based on a PBS NewsHour story the night before. The news is obviously good for Twitter, but there was one interesting, not-so-good fact pointed out by reporter Spencer Michaels: “One industry group says only 8% of Americans have ever used Twitter, compared to 51% for Facebook.”
So Facebook remains the social media star, but what about its potential to help with business—your business. An interesting experiment is taking place just across the Potomac River from SIPA Central in Rockville, Md., a suburb of Washington, D.C. (This is also one town over from where the U.S. Open golf tournament begins today.) On March 1, Rockville Central, a community news outlet for that town, moved its entire operation to a Facebook page.
“There [were] always two different conversations going on,” Cindy Cotte Griffiths, the site’s editor, told the Nieman Journalism Lab—one conversation on the website and one on the Facebook page. Why force competition when it was usually the same discussion? “Everyone’s always trying to get people out of Facebook,” she said. “And we’re like, ‘Well, we’re already here.’”
Here are my initial impressions from the site:
1. It’s pretty active. I started counting the posts from the last 24 hours and stopped at 10.
2. The posts are timely and relevant. One talks about the incredibly popular Capital Bikeshare program in D.C.—yes, dear European audience, America is finally catching on!—that will soon be coming to Rockville. (This started a healthy discussion.) Another announces a meeting of the Rockville Rotary Club and another the arrival of MathTree summer camps.
3. Just about everything is fairly serious.
4. They are taking advantage of many forms of communication—there are links to video of announcements for the mayoral race, radio interviews, weather forecast charts and cool photography.
5. The editors get a chance to establish their personalities.
On Tuesday, Poynter published an article about the site, calling it “Eight Lessons on Facebook News Publishing.” Wrote Jeff Sonderman: “Most news organizations would never consider following the Facebook-only path of Rockville Central…They can’t sell ads on Facebook, and the lack of control and independence would be a deal-breaker. But even so, they can learn from what Rockville Central is doing.”
Here are his eight lessons mined from Founder and Publisher Brad Rourke:
1. Your work may reach more people. Each post gets about 2,000 impressions on average. “Traffic is way up,” Rourke said, “because… instead of a page for people to go to, the content is going out into people’s streams.”
2. You can reach new people. “We don’t need new and easier ways for the people who already go to City Council meetings to argue,” Rourke said.
3. You can build relationships more quickly.
4. You should use personal voices. “We’ve learned that it’s important to work [in] both the institutional voice of Rockville Central but also our personal voices,” Rourke said.
5. Timing matters. There are peak periods for Facebook and it’s best to share when people are on.
A couple flaws:
6. “There’s no categorizing function or tagging function, so you can’t really organize notes very well,” Rourke said.
7. Archiving and search functions are weak. “The thing that it lacks is history,” Rourke said. Google’s no help here.
And perhaps most importantly…
8. Facebook is “its own place,” Rourke said. “I think it’s worthwhile to have a Facebook strategy that goes beyond, ‘How can we get these people from Facebook over to where we live?’”
Sonderman concluded: “So while a major news website shouldn’t go Facebook-only, it also shouldn’t see Facebook solely as a means of promoting its site.” Post notes, links, messages, video, photos. Build a community there instead of just trying to steer them away. Or as Rourke said, “…have a Facebook bureau.”
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