Do you have a personal Facebook account? You should, and your club should, too. The fact is, Facebook is how the world is communicating right now, and if you want your club to move forward, you have to participate.
Your club should, in fact, have at minimum two Facebook pages. The first one is a group page, with club members as the only participants in the group. This page is not for the public to see. Here is where you should share the information only club members care about. For instance, wish one another happy birthday here. Share news of members and reference meeting reminders. Each member is able to post on this page.
Your club also needs to have a fan page, which is the type of Facebook page most people recognize. This page will have a couple of administrators to control the content. This is the page we want the public to follow.
Once you’ve set up the page, follow these hints to make it shine.
·
Make
sure all of your members “like” your public-facing page, even if they are
“members” of your group page, so all posted content will appear on their feeds
for their friends to see.
·
Stay
away posting the self-referential information; post what would most appeal to
the public. For instance, if your club spent Make a Difference Day working at
the local food bank, make sure you’ve posted lots and lots of pictures and
written about what you’ve done.
·
Tag,
tag, tag. You want to tag each person in each picture, you want to tag where
you are, and you want to tag the project. Why? Let’s say there’s a picture of
me on Facebook stocking apples at the North Texas Food Bank for Make a
Difference Day. First you tag me in the picture, now all of my Facebook will
see that picture in their news feed. That’s a lot of people seeing what we’re
doing. Now let’s say the picture had four Altrusans in it, all tagged. That’s
the Facebook network of four people seeing us working hard and having fun
servicing our community.
·
In
addition to tagging people in posts and photos, we want write in the
description that we’re at the North Texas Food Bank. That will mean our picture
will also pop up on a Google search. You can add more, like “Altrusa
International Inc. of Dallas serving the North Texas Food Bank on Make a
Difference Day.”
There are a couple more ways to use Facebook that can be beneficial. An event or fund-raiser your club holds can have a fan page of its own. This works best if it is an annual event as it takes a while to build a following. Have each of your members “like” the page, so Facebook will share that information with all their friends.
You can also create an event on Facebook. By creating an event you can show the time, place, date, and what the activity is. Next, you want to invite all of your members and ask them to invite or share this with all their friends. For instance, in addition to our annual fund-raiser having its own Facebook fan page, with lots of pictures and glowing remarks, The fund-raiser is created as a Facebook event each year. Our goal is to have each of our members share this with all of their friends and then to have at least some of their friends share it with their friends. This is how something goes viral. You remember the old shampoo commercial: “and they’ll tell two friends, and they’ll tell two friends, and so on and so on”? Well, this is just that on a larger scale.
Consider focusing more on the Club website and Facebook for the coming year. Get your various pages up to speed and looking great. Make it interesting to nonmembers. Create tags that will generate Google hits. Add lots of pictures, videos, and blogs. There are so many great reasons to be an Altrusan, let’s use social media to let the rest of the world know it.
Deborah Hecht
Altrusa International Inc. of Dallas
Please let your voice be heard. Write your ideas, and send them to Governor Beth for publishing on “Thoughts From the Mighty Ninth.”
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