Social Media Month recap: Facebook

Facebook. Seems like it’s been around forever. For many of you, it was your very first social media experience. And even though its changes generally spark a lot of fervor among many users, eventually we all just jump in, figure it out and continue being faithful users. Or back away until we see enough others jumping in that we feel comfortable following suit.

There’s probably a greater lesson in that, but let’s move on for now.

Facebook’s relatively long history translates into a relatively wide reach, especially for our papers. Though our core accounts have about as many followers here as on Twitter (with the exception of the Redlands Daily Facts, which instead has about twice as many Twitter followers), it seems our particular readership is more consistently mobilized via Facebook.

But we can always do better.

To that end, I offered up some Facebook tips among my Social Media Month challenge posts throughout April. In case you missed them, here’s a quick recap, in no particular order:

• Facebook is a valuable crowdsourcing tool, especially if you engage your readership.
• Once engaged, Facebook is a great companion to Storify, especially if you’ve installed the Google Chrome plug-in.
• Facebook’s sharing function makes it easy to promote the good work of others, giving credit where credit is due while expanding any story’s reach. (This has been particularly useful in our continued promotion of Digital First Media’s American Homecomings project.)
• Facebook is a great place to promote those stories that might have fallen through the cracks.
• Since our commenting system is on Facebook, it’s the prime choice for jumping into community discussions of your stories.