The Power of Promotion! On-line Marketing For Toastmasters Club Growth. Rae Stonehouse
internet by default. All somebody has to do is ‘Like’ your page and they can follow and interact with everything that gets posted to your Page. Your updates will show up in their News Feed (Timeline).
Facebook Groups on the other hand can be an effective way for an organization to share discussions and common interests among the members in a way that is more private than a Facebook Page. When you create a Group, you can decide whether to make it publicly available for anyone to join, require administrator approval for members to join or keep it private and by invitation only. This allows the Administrator some control in who they let in for membership. As a private group you have the option of who you admit for membership and who you don’t.
As an Administrator for several Facebook Groups I tend to check out every applicant to see if they have a connection to the particular group in some way. If I don’t see a connection or friends of theirs in the group, I deny their membership. There is a fad taking place right now, for lack of a better word, where individuals seem to be competing with each other to see how many groups they can join. I have personally seen several requests from individuals in a day to join a particular Facebook Group. Each of them had over a thousand groups that they were members of. As I mentioned before, unless I saw some connection with the group they were applying to join, I would deny their membership.
Similar to Pages, new posts by a Group are included in the News Feeds of its members and members can interact and share with one another from the group.
For Toastmaster’s clubs wanting to create exposure for their club in their local community and beyond and increasing their membership, creating a Facebook Page is likely the way to go. While I said that there were advantages to having a Group Page, such as private conversations, the limitations to a membership-only Facebook Group can work against growing your Toastmaster’s club. Once again, think marketing. A Toastmaster’s club Facebook Page allows you to promote your club to the world, or even better, your geographical region and share information. There is likely a market interested in reading it.
A Facebook Group is likely limited to your existing club members only, if they actually ask to join. Potential members wouldn’t be able to see your club in action and get a feel about what membership would look like. Whereas, a Facebook Page would be open to everyone.
Whether you opt for a closed, membership-only group or a wide-open fan page, there is value to giving some consideration to developing Terms of Reference for the group. These terms in essence outline what is appropriate conduct and what is inappropriate conduct. It also allows the Administrator to state what the consequences of misbehaviour would be. This is likely more enforceable within a Facebook Group than it would be in a Page.
While you want to engage your fans with discussion i.e. back and forth discussion, you need to be aware of the risk of doing so. Even though as Toastmasters we like to think that we are a more enlightened and respectful group, there will always be individuals who don’t share our values. An old on-line term for them is ‘trolls’ more commonly known now as cyberbullies.
A cyberbully will use your Facebook discussion/timeline to forward their agenda. It may be to make themselves look more important than they really are or perhaps they like using a public forum to create a shock reaction. As the Administrator of the group, you need to be vigilant in ensuring that this behaviour doesn’t start in the first place and taking proactive action if it does. I’ll talk some more about this a little later.
Some organizations have tried to maintain control of the comments posted on their Facebook Pages by not allowing the public i.e. fans/followers to post to their Timeline. While this action may help them in the short-term I personally feel that by restricting input, they are also restricting dialogue. I don’t care much for Facebook Pages that are strictly promoting to me or feeding me their info without allowing me to respond in kind.
As an Administrator for a non-Toastmasters Facebook Group I can’t stress enough the value of creating these terms of reference. I learned the lesson the hard way. One of the members of the group was posting harassing and sexually explicit comments to the group about a particular leader of the organization that owned the Facebook Group page. As the Administrator of the Facebook Group I advised her that her postings were inappropriate in this particular venue and that if she had a disagreement with this individual that she should deal with him alone, not on the group. As she didn’t heed my caution and continued with her inappropriate comments I advised that as this was a private group, should she not desist, I would revoke her membership from this Facebook Group. She did continue and I subsequently revoked her membership from the Group. She was not a member of the organization that owned the Facebook Page.
She then started a smear campaign on-line to get even with me. She posted negative comments on her personal Facebook Page as well as on Twitter. She encouraged her Facebook fans to contact me with support of her. She next filed a complaint with the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal alleging that I had deprived her of her rights to be a member of a public group. I had to approach the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) about the threats that I was receiving from her and I also consulted with a lawyer. Eventually she dropped her complaint to the Human Rights Tribunal but even to this day, more than two years later, she continues to harass me on-line as well as many other members of our community. If you are interested in learning more about cyberbullies & social media here is an article I wrote on the subject a while back. How to Deal With a Cyber Bully: Power Networking Tips & Techniques.
In essence, the Terms of Reference for your Facebook Group page serves the same purpose as voting a new member into your Toastmaster’s club i.e. you vote them in so that you can vote them out [worst case scenario of course].
As an Administrator, Facebook gives you the option of posting as yourself or as the Administrator of the Group. Any messages posted as the Group Administrator will not have your name or identity connected to it.
How to Create and Set-up a Facebook “Fan” Page
There are several elements to the public view of your Facebook Page as well as the Administrative i.e. backend, what the public doesn’t see.
We start off by exploring the graphic elements of the front of our Facebook Fan Page, then we focus on the text/copy portion that is located under the About tab.
Cover Photos (banner)
Your Cover Photo provides the first impression of your Facebook Page. The old adage may still hold true … people do judge a (face)book by its cover.
If you have graphic artistic ability, or access to someone who does, by all means create a design cover that is representative of your club’s personality.
As a Toastmaster’s club, your club name and perhaps your community should be featured in your Cover Photo. Toastmasters International has guidelines that must be considered when designing your cover photo. You can learn more about branding at Toastmasters Brand Portal. One important restriction is that you are not allowed to incorporate the Toastmasters International logo as part of any other graphic.
How Not to Design a Cover Photo
I include the screen shot below as an example of a good idea that doesn’t seem to work. It is a business that has gone to a lot of trouble to create a visually attractive graphic, yet the graphic has placement of important text that gets hidden by the text that Facebook uploads i.e. the name of the Facebook Page & the categories that it is listed in. The result is a very busy first impression that wouldn’t likely be what the page owner had in mind.
How to Design a Cover Photo
I created the simple cover photo (below)