Recently we decided it was time to get more serious with our Facebook presence. Malenke | Barnhart has been on Facebook for years, but our activity generally correlated to the amount of non-client-billable time a staff member might have. Obviously not an ideal approach, and certainly one we would NEVER recommend to a client. So the time to adjust was long past due.
We had been around so long that our Facebook presence was actually in the form of a Profile. Our first goal was to migrate our community over to a new Facebook Page. A Page offers some tools that a Profile doesn’t, including reporting, the ability for users to “Like” it, and more flexibility in customizing the overall experience. In general, a business should use a Page, whereas an individual should develop a Profile.
After creating our new Page, the first step was to dole out administration privileges. A nice feature of a Facebook Page is the ability to give any Profile access to administer it. Because all of us already had Facebook profiles, we spent all of two minutes giving proper permission to all the people at Malenke | Barnhart that contribute on Facebook.
Our next challenge was to move content. We chose to focus on our photo assets and not worry about written posts. While it would be nice to have that content in our new Page, the context of a post is “in the moment”, so transferring the data was not a big concern. Luckily, our photo assets were rather minimal. It took little time to download our existing photos and upload them to the Page. At the same time, we took the opportunity to reconsider our photo organization. We opted to create some more specific albums so that as we add to our Page photos, we’ll have a model for doing so.
With old content moved, we wanted to populate our new Page with some new interesting tidbits before inviting the world in. Luckily, we had a Facebook Profile update from that day and had recently published some blog posts. We re-posted our Profile update, then added in a new update about our latest blog post.
The last step was to start notifying people of our new Facebook Page. We used four different approaches to start spreading the word:
- We notified our internal staff via e-mail that the new Page was ready and asked them participate.
- We began spreading the word through our individual Facebook networks.
- We published an update on our old Profile announcing the new Page and detailing what could be found at the new location.
- We put the word out via our @malenkebarnhart Twitter feed.
While we did consolidate and refine our Facebook presence, there are still two outstanding pieces. First, our Facebook Place. When Facebook announced Places, we were quick to hop in and claim ours. Facebook offers the option to merge Places and Pages. Unfortunately, the end result removes a lot of the benefit we see in using a Page. In particular, we lose the ability to customize our landing page, and the navigation converts from the well-known tabs to a more subtle left navigation. With this in mind–and the fact that our place of business isn’t particularly critical to conducting our business–we opted to not merge our Place into our Page.
Second, our URL. After creating a Facebook Page and gathering at least 25 fans, Facebook allows a Page to have a friendly username. Unfortunately, none of the usernames we wanted were available. These were names like “malenkebarnhart,” “mbarnhart,” “malenkebarnhart.com”–terms that clearly no other organization should have (or has) claimed. We’re still working through that issue. Facebook doesn’t make it easy to find ways to contact their support staff and their Help content on the topic is decidedly thin. Hopefully we’ll have that resolved soon, though, and we’ll let you all know as soon as we have a nice, readable URL!
