Best practice for unions using Facebook
More and more unions are using Facebook, but are they using them well?
Here’s some advice on getting union Facebook use up to best practice:
- Use Facebook Pages, not Groups: Pages are a lot more versatile and have a lot of features not available to groups.
- Make sure you interact with your members: The point of Facebook is interaction, comments, “liking”, uploading photos and videos, and sharing links. Engage with your members.
- Utilise Facebook Insights: Facebook offers a lot of tools to “business” users, and these are available for free.
- Link your social networking with your union website: Facebook offers the ability to promote your Facebook page on your website. This allows Facebook users to become friends or fans directly from your union’s site.
- Find your existing members on Facebook: You can upload contact lists and email address databases to Facebook to find your members.
- Keep your interactions relevant: Avoid update fatigue with your Facebook fans, friends and members by not posting too often and varying your content (have some pictures, some links, some general comment, etc).
Read more here: details and examples.
Do you have any other suggestions on how unions can best use Facebook? Leave a comment
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Category: Blog, Social Networking, Web | Tags: ,communications, Facebook
Interesting article. My only add to that list is to keep content interesting by posting different things in different locations. Ie don’t post a media release to your website then tweet about it and add it to your facebook page. A small amount of cross posting is ok in my opinion but if it’s all you are doing it’s boring and a sure fire way of being hidden. The thing about facebook and Twitter is that it encourages you to be adventurous, and to post things that aren’t a page long and out of date (which media releases normally are.)
Actually unions should consider groups as part of their Face Book strategy; especially as employers are becoming more savvy about Face Book organizing being done by unions. Groups can be private and invite only, which can be more appealing to union members worried about being identified through a fan page.
Facebook’s causes and events functionality should also be used.
True – Facebook groups can be useful for specific tasks such as trying to organise specific groups of workers.
I don’t really see Facebook as a useful organising tool – but rather as a communications tool.
The events function is also a very useful one, but again, not great for organising, since Facebook users can say that are “attending” a union event with no real commitment to attending.
Cheers
Alex
We are on strike against the Museum of War and Museum of Civilization, Canadian federal museums located in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. We have created a Facebook page, Fairness and justice for museum workers. Please check it out for a real-time account of how we are using Facebook for the strikers to connect with each other, and to demonstrate all the creative tactics used in this strike which is now more than 50 days old. And please use the page to send us messages of support. Thank you!
Hi Morna, I love the striking treasures poster! And the projector graffiti. Good luck with the campaign, hopefully management will see some sense… Atosha