Monday, December 5, 2011 not one big Facebook page please, but lots of little ones
by Dan Slee
A few days ago I had something of a Eureka moment.
We were looking at how a leisure centre could best use Facebook. In the room with me was a colleague and the centre manager himself.
"Maybe we should just have the one Facebook page for leisure centres right across the borough."
Hmmm. That didn't feel right.
"Or how about one for a leisure centre?"
Better. Much better. But that still didn't quite feel totally there. We spoke about the centre user and what they may want.
"So, what if someone loved zumba and didn't want to be bothered with gym opening times?"
We searched for zumba and Walsall on Facebook. That's the borough we were in. Just to see what is there.
We found an zumba instructor and a rather magnificent 1,400 people liking her page.
Wow.
Suddenly, it became quite clear.
Would a zumba enthusiast be more likely to sign-up for zumba updates? Or zumba floating in amongst gym, badminton, squash, swimming, weight lifting and judo?
Or to ask another question, when you look for information on a council website, would you want it straight away or would you want to have to go through six other services before you got the lollipop?
That's a simple question. You want the one.
So, maybe, what we need is not just one big Facebook page. Or even an oligarchy of pages based on services. What we need are lots of little ones for each class, group or community.
Look at New York City. They have 5,000 people liking their City Council Facebook page and a similar number on Twitter. But they have 400,000 following @metmuseum as well as 1,300 liking an AIDS initiative.
Or look at the Scottish Island of Orkney. On Twitter 2,000 follow the council, 4,000 like their library, 400 the story telling festival and 80 sign-up for the jobs feed. So in other words, twice as many like things the council does rather than the council itself.
Look even at Walsall Council. 4,000 like the council Twitter while 800 sign up for @walsallwildlife a countryside ranger's tweets about bats, birds and wildlife and 160 getting environmental health updates.
So, it's not about having one medium size official presence jealously guarded by a comms person.
It's actually about having scores of engaged little ones that together add up to a better connected, better informed population.
Reader Comments (4)
interesting blog. My wife runs a yoga business in Walsall and the majority of traffic comes via facebook. In a lot of ways social media is like any other communication method - simply configure from a customer/used journey point of view. Most people won't really care if the service is provided by the council or not, and increasgingly localism and austerity will increasignly see others providing services anyway. It's just like a having a leaflet about Zumba which also mentions other activities on offer at leisure centres, and another leaflet about what the leisure cenrtres offer, also mentioning Zumba. This meets the need of the person saying specifically 'I want Zumba in Walsall' and the person making a general inquiry saying 'What do leisure centres in Walsall offer'.
Yes, exactly. Although Coventry City Council does have a big Facebook page, we also have some lively FB pages for other places and services within the Council. So 186 people are fans of our medieval St Mary's Guildhall, 310 like our libraries service, and 1,782 love Coombe Country Park. We all like each other (literally and metaphorically) so can move around all the pages easily, and sometimes we repost stuff from the smaller Facebook pages onto our main site to reach a wider audience. Works for all of us. Think perhaps the challenge for us is making sure that the pages, once set up, are kept alive even if they have a small following, as we're not looking after the other FB pages.
Thanks Fran and Boris for your feedback on this post.
You both make some really good points.
Facebook - whilst gigantic in terms of scale and reach - is actually quite tricky to get right for anyone trying to use it properly and effectively in order to promote a business or an organisation. There are lots of examples out there of it not being well delivered well. Less common is really good practice by commercial organisations.
Coventry City Council's facebook page has almost 20,000 friends, approaching the equivalent of almost 10% of the City's population. So it can be done.
I do take Boris's point, though - customers are less worried about who delivers the service and more interested in the quality of the service and its value for money.
Cheers, both.
I have come back to this post following a RT by comms2point0 twitter feed.
At risk of sounding like a "jealously guarding comms person" (which I probably am) I feel I have to respectfully disagree.
I am going to try and stretch the story of the Zumba class a bit further - so forgive me if I break it somewhere along the way!
A leisure centre might have three Zumba classes a week, hosted by three different teachers (who also teach aerobics, and trampoline on other days of the week). A local freelance Zumba teacher, however, may run 10 classes a week, all over Walsall.
The staff at the leisure centre could end up with perhaps nine pages to run (one for each of three sessions of Zumba, Aerobics and Trampoline). Even if there is only one Zumba page (for all three classes), is there the audience there (max 90 people: 3 * 30 class attendees) to maintain a page? Is there the staff resource (time, energy, creativity) to keep those micro communities going?
For the local freelance Zumba teacher, Zumba is her income, life and passion - and that potential community is all her clients (or potential clients) so she has more chance of having the resource to keep it going.
I would absolutely agree there is a niche for a local Zumba community there - but I would disagree that it should be on the micro scale of "session" or "Leisure centre" - that sounds like segmentation too far. I would also disagree that the leisure centre should be running it, or owning it.
In my favoured model, there would be one account (page/twitter handle) for the leisure centre, but the account would engage local Zumba enthusiasts on their own turf - the existing local Zumba page. Comment, post updates, be entertaining - but do it where the audience already is (and the existing Zumba teacher gets the kudos of being the community owner). If you go quiet for a while, it matters less - because the rest of the community will carry it forward.
Too often I have seen the "if we build it, they will come" attitude to social media - and I don't think it is the best approach. I have seen this again and again at my work - teams desperate for a twitter presence, who then grow bored after a couple of weeks (literally) and it then drifts away. Or, they get followers, but their followers aren't "the public" (most often, they are other people doing the same job in a different area - not that it isn't valuable in and of itself for peer learning, but it is not why they wanted the page originally).
To use an analogy from my own world (policing) - why hold a public meeting in a dank village hall which only 3 people attend, when you could go to the coffee shop and meet all these people in their own space, in their own time.