Tips for Maximizing Facebook and Your Web Site

Frank Barry, managing consultant at Blackbaud and moderator of the NetWits Think Tank blog, recently posted four Facebook tips for nonprofit success based on real-life experiences of nonprofits.

"You can't just throw up a page and expect to be successful. You have to be thoughtful, strategic and knowledgeable,” he wrote, sharing these four tips:

1. Create a regular page, not a group or Causes page. There are way more features that you get with a Facebook page that you don't get through groups and Causes pages, including:

• You get a friendly URL.
• Your page gets indexed by Google.
• There's no limit on the number of people who can become your fans.
• Fans get notified of your status updates.
• You can write on the wall, upload photos and join discussion groups.
• You can integrate your blog/Web site content on your page.

Some examples of great nonprofit Facebook pages Barry recommended are LIVESTRONG, One Campaign and Stanford University.

2. Participate and be a community. He pointed to the LIVESTRONG as a great example of this. Be active daily, sharing news, video, photos, stories, etc., related to your organization; and engage with fans by commenting on wall posts, "liking" things they share and helping them connect with others.

3. Get people to engage with you in more than one way. E-mail is still the killer app, and it's important to have a solid home base in the form of a Web site. Take a tip from the One Campaign, which has its page set up to go to a custom tab where visitors are shown how they can engage with the organization beyond Facebook.

4. Pay attention to stats. Facebook's Insight Portal allows administrators to see stats on how well wall posts and content are engaging visitors.

Stats measured include user exposure, total interactions, demographic information and post quality score (measures how engaging posts have been to users in the last seven days), among others.