Your new social media for charities routine is all set using Twitter. Now, let’s look at Facebook for your charity web marketing purposes.

Facebook! We use it to check out photos of our friends and kids. We use it as a news source for the day’s latest articles. We use it to share our love for brands, engage in online contests organized by various companies, or let a company know when its customer service has failed us. These days, the content on Facebook almost fully mirrors many individuals’ lives. People make their personal profiles their homes for their likes and hates, and businesses can use Facebook Pages as a gateway to interact with people.

Your Facebook Business Page timeline is the ‘home’ where your organization’s fans, friends, customers, and critics can all interact directly with your company. They can post questions, comments, feedback, or fan mail. Fellow fans of your business may interact with each other. Many individuals will interact with the content your business has posted itself. There are a few ways people can interact on your Facebook Business Page that you should be monitoring:

Timeline posts

If you have it enabled, people can post messages to your brand’s public-facing Facebook Timeline. They can say good things, complain, talk about a recent experience they had with your brand—anything! People can even post photos straight to your timeline. These remarks are user-generated content about your brand.

Comments

Comments are an opportunity to react to a post in the timeline. Both you and your fans can comment. Consider it a mini conversation that spurred from the original post.

Private Messages

If you go to a brand’s Facebook Page, you will see a “Message” button on the bottom right corner of their cover photo. When you click this button, a box pops up and prompts you to start a private message with that brand. This is a very important piece to monitor, as this is where many fans will send support-related concerns and questions about your products or services. See the image below for an example of this.

Reviews

Formerly known as “Recommendations,” Facebook has introduced the opportunity to leave a review in the form of a comment and a star rating. Many restaurants and local businesses are taking advantage of this functionality to build awareness. It’s important to be diligent when monitoring this section, because if someone leaves you a bad review you should gently comment with an apology or empathetic explanation.

Another important thing to understand about the content you post is that the more people interact with a specific post, the more viral that post becomes. Your “News Feed” calculates is the most relevant and important items occurring in your network. Your goal should be both to react to important items on your business’ page and to get your posts featured in others’ News Feeds.

Join us next time, when we discuss how we tackle Linkedin for your charity web marketing