Local Facebook pages

General
1

I believe we could reach a wider audience and improve our community building if we used Facebook more.

I’m thinking of a chapter page for Berlin, featuring events there, too, for people to share and stuff.

What do you think?

Anyone here having experience with managing Facebook pages, maybe even multiple?

2

Facebook pages are like blogs, Facebook groups are like forums.

Pages are controlled by its owners, the visible posts are the ones they post in the page’s name. People can comment. People can write own posts but those are hardly visible in a sidebar.

Pages’ posts don’t reach too many users unless you pay for advertising your posts. https://www.facebook.com/help/451485634864935

Groups are like forums.

Groups recently (they introduce it slowly throughout all groups and not instantly to all) had the horrible change that admins can only invite 250 members to events they create: https://www.facebook.com/help/167159300010051

As everywhere else, there is spam, reaching from fake users posting ads for games to marketing people promoting unrelated tech events just because they see “tech” or “developer” in your group or page title. Since users’ posts get more attention in groups, groups are probably more affected by spam.

PS: Two decisions to think about:

  • Do you want to link to meetup events or use the FB event system? The latter might split community activity on event pages (if there is any), the first would avoid the benefits of being in the FB system with users inviting users and users seeing events their friends go to. Also see FB’s 250 invite limit for groups.
  • Do you want to put every event that is on meetup on FB as well? This might be a lot of work, this might be annoying to users if there are a lot of unrelated events (the latter problem might already exist on Meetup)
3

Thanks for the detailed reply!

I totally share your concerns (except the 250 limit which is irrelevant for our events). I would like to keep meetup.com as the source of truth for events but promote events as much as possible on Facebook, too. I do like the “your friend x is joining this event” thing for instance. Not sure what do here, maybe just try it out for a meetup with no limitations like the co-learning groups. Yes, I see it is doubled work but I hope we can handle that.

Not sure how annoying the unrelated event thing is. Yes, we do have the same issue on meetup.com but they are quite smart about subscriptions etc…

I would also like to link the Twitter accounts to the to-be-created Facebook pages so non Twitter users can follow.

4

I did it. https://www.facebook.com/opentechschool.berlin

work in progress…

5

Let’s bring this back to life!

I am collecting inspiring educational resources to post them on our Berlin OTS Facebook page every once in a while.

I am compiling links here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HT3zlUtOq-HGUIxjKB7icZVJEnNMCD4PfAIAv9EbbRM/edit?usp=sharing

If you have any beginner-friendly articles or blog posts, feel free to share!

Thanks :wink:

1 Like