This End Down

I wrote in June on Migrating Intervarsityuf.org to Facebook, and I have some thoughts about how the last few months have gone in using a Facebook page for our InterVarsity chapter at UF.

Benefits of switching to a Facebook page (from a group)

• You can generate status updates and posts to your wall, allowing you a much greater capability for daily interaction with students.
• People are more likely to be a fan of something than to join a group.
• You can have multiple “tabs” (meaning you can have multiple pages to your Page.) You can choose which is the landing page when visitors first visit your site, and you can customize these to look almost any way you like (although some customizations might require the knowledge of HTML).
• Pages get detailed user interaction tracking (called Insights) about fans added, fans who leave, and how fans interact with their posts and updates.
• The user interface is more like the personal profiles they’re used to interacting with, making the page feel more dynamic, comfortable, and personal.
• Once you reach 100 users, you can create a custom URL for your page (for example, ours is http://www.facebook.com/intervarsityuf ).

Detriments of switching to a Facebook page (from a group)

• Becoming a “fan” of a page has less feel of commitment than joining a group. More people become fans, but it carries less weight than joining a group.
• You cannot message your members; you can only send updates. Both show up in their inbox, but updates are not the default view, and also don’t show up in their unread message count.
• You cannot invite all of your fans to an event; you can only invite people you’re already friends with.

That’s all I have for now. I’ll try to update this if I think of more. Overall the experience has been great, but the limitations on event invitations and messaging is putting a huge damper on our plans to use the Page exclusively.

I’ve been keeping up http://intervarsityuf.org/ for the last few years. It runs on a proprietary PHP/MySQL Content Management System I wrote specifically for the site (called CampusPress, but I wrote and named it before I’d heard of WordPress–I promise.) It’s essentially an underpowered version of some of the simplest posting and paging features of Wordpress, and were I to start again I’d just install Wordpress.

The problem is, not a lot of people (as far as I can tell) actually use the site. People often find us through the site, but it’s seldom that I hear a student talking about their use of the site or discovering something new through the site. It’s a pain to remember to update it, since we can do Notes and Events in Facebook, and getting students whose lives revolve around Facebook to regularly use an external web site is ridiculous. What intrinsic motivation do they have to regular visit the site? Nothing. And few to none of them use RSS readers, so that does nothing.

On the other hand, the Facebook group

• Allows us to create events with RSVPs and photo galleries
• Allows students to invite friends to events and discuss rides/etc
• Gives me a convenient way to message everyone (we have a Listserv on the web site, but e-mailing students is almost worthless these days–if you want a response, send a facebook message)
• Requires no backend programming or updates
• Is free

Finally, Facebook pages are even more powerful than groups:

• They allow your page to be visible to non-facebook-users (increasing outside visibility)
• They make your group an actual facebook entity, meaning you can use the Publisher–release status updates, write/import Notes, post links, photos, and videos–and these updates show up in your students’ feeds
• Using a new feature called Insights, you can track your visits and the popularity of certain aspects of your page
• There’s much more possibility for customization, allowing you to add tabs and customize your site design and programming using FBML (Facebook’s version of HTML)

So, I’ve created the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship at UF InterVarsity Christian Fellowship – UF Undergrad page I realized after I created it that I should’ve named it “InterVarsity Undergrad at UF”, so I hope that doesn’t come back to haunt me when Greek (and Grad?) chapters want their own pages. I’m trying to figure out if I should start a new page now, before I invite people, or try to learn how to change it.

Once I learn how to change the name or just start a new one (or just stick with this name), I’ll put up more information about how everything’s working out in the transition. I tagged this with “facebookpage“, and hopefully I’ll remember to do the same in the future.