Facebook: Things you can do and how to do it

Your personal page

If you don’t already have one, get yourself a personal page on Facebook.

Your own personal page doesn’t commit you to doing more than you wish, but millions of people are finding it a great way to stay in touch with friends and family, and to share comments, photos, videos and links one-to-one or right through your group of friends.

Remember that you can choose who to have as a friend – either you ask others or they ask you. In other words, a friendship only happens on Facebook through mutual acceptance. Once you have friends, you can discretely choose to remove them from your list at any time and you can remove any posts or comments from your own page if you want to.

For some, privacy is a big issue. It’s therefore important to set your privacy settings to suit your needs. Remember, however, that the closer you set your privacy, the less open and engaging you may be to those wishing to make contact.

How to start? Go to Facebook.com and sign up on the homepage. The instructions are straightforward enough but we suggest that you place an image of yourself from the beginning. That’s because it makes your page ‘real’ for people to identify you and to become friends.

There are lots of ways of acquiring friends – the easiest is through the search box at the top of your personal page. An email address, if known, is obviously more precise than just using a name, which may bring up thousands of people with the same name. Become a friend to anyone by clicking on ‘Add as Friend’ at the top of their page. Once you have a few friends, start checking their pages for friends who could be asked to befriend you too.

A very useful contribution to building traffic to the GreatStart100 campaign website happens when you place a website link on your personal Facebook page. Do this in ‘Edit My Profile’ and click on ‘Contact Information’ (left side). In the ‘Websites’ panel enter www.greatstart100.org.nz

GreatStart100 Facebook fan page

1. Find the fan page in a link from the GreatStart100 website (above right panel) or from your Facebook search box – use the key words “Great Start 100”.
2. Click on ‘Like’ at the top of the fan page and you will have automatically joined the page.
3. Gather more fans for the fan page, from your own friends, by clicking on ‘Suggest to Friends’ in the top left column, under the Greatstart100 logo*. This will bring up a panel showing your friends (photo snaps). Click on your choices (photos will shade) and enter a message if you wish, then ‘Send Invitations’. Tip; don’t load too many friends before sending because the system can fail if loaded too heavily. You may need to send in small batches of say 30 at a time.

*Your friends will receive an alert and decide whether to join themselves.

How to participate on Facebook and help build support

In general a fan page is more effective in getting attention if there are large numbers of people enrolled as fans and if those fans are actively participating in the page. That’s because all posts and comments on the page are picked up and shared in peoples’ ‘News Feed’ pages (viewable at ‘Home’ in top right of the Facebook page, or when you first log into Facebook for a session). In addition, Facebook has an electronic means of identifying the level and quality of interaction and rewarding that with a higher page rank and more chances for people to see entries in the ‘News Feed’.

So it helps if you visit the GreatStart100 fan page routinely when checking into your Facebook personal page.

Following is a list of things you can do; the more frequently you do it the better for raising the profile of Great Start 100 in Facebook.

1. Make a regular entry in ‘Write Something’ at the top of the fan page. This will automatically appear on the fan page and in the pages ‘News Feed’ to all fans. Your entries are much more effective if you make a link (to another website or fan page), or attach a video or photos.
2. Videos are best and easiest when uploaded from Youtube.com, so if you’re making your own videos, open a free account at Youtube.com and post as many videos as you like. Photos can be uploaded directly from your computer desktop. Make sure that the file size is a maximum of 4MB.
3. ‘Comment’ or ‘Like’ any existing posts because this helps get more attention in ‘News Feeds’. When you ‘Like’ it’s a very quick way to acknowledge the post and a ‘Comment’ gets conversations going.
4. Activate your mobile phone to receive status updates, but you must first activate your phone for Facebook Mobile first – do that on the Facebook homepage and click on ‘Mobile’ at the footer.
5. A range of other actions can be taken. These include:

• If you are the administrator for other fan pages ‘Add to My Favourites Pages’ (top left of the GreatStart100 fan page), will place a GreatStart100 fan page tag on any other fan pages you may administer.
• Join in ‘Discussions’ in the top panel of the GreatStart100 fan page.
• When making a post in any of your friend’s personal pages, make reference to the fan page and make a link.

Back to ‘Ways you can support this online promotion’.