As we gear up for the 2011 Technology Conference & Expo, we want to bring you behind the scenes of the online communications and social technologies that we are putting together around the conference. With this new series, The Tech Behind Tech, we'll share with you some of the lessons learned as we set up Facebook Pages, mobile sites and apps, and more.
Building a Custom Facebook Page
Mandy Stahl, ASAE Community Manager, and Tom Kugler, ASAE Website Administrator, talk about their lessons learned from creating an event Facebook Page.
Before launching your Page, there is a lot of planning and strategy to work through. Ask yourself "How would my members benefit from this" and follow up with "Are my members active on Facebook professionally?" If you cannot answer the first question then go back to the drawing board of your social engagement strategy. If your members are not already active professionally on Facebook then maybe it isn't the right platform for you to spend your time.
Although social media content can seem random and in-the-moment, it is important to have a content strategy in place before announcing your Page, and be ready to follow through with vital, relevant posts and comments. It is also important to not annoy fans with too many posts, or with only content which reads like an advertisement. Give them relevant information — hopefully like we are doing here.
Once you've decided to have a Page, it is also important to understand the technical challenges that you now face. Following are just a few examples:
- Facebook changes how it does things often and rapidly; so many tutorials for creating a Page are outdated. Some discuss using the FBML (Facebook Markup Language) approach as an alternate to the iframe approach; as of this writing, only the iframe approach can be used for new Pages.
- When coding is complete, save your iframe as a PHP or ASP file; this will be the index Facebook references. When Facebook loads the iframe, they do a POST to the index in order to pass data to your application, and some servers are set up to not allow a POST to a file with the .html extension.
- Much has been written about removing scrollbars from your iframe, but nothing is to be found on the topic of removing a horizontal scrollbar from the entire Page. Before a Page is published, a box appears at the top indicating the Page is not published; for reasons unknown, this box exceeds the width of Facebook's content area. Fear not — publish your Page, and the scrollbar disappears along with the box.
Social media communities and platforms change rapidly. When working on your Page, you need to be ready to make changes as necessary. Second time around we not only tailored the type of content for the different audience, but we decided to make the landing page a simpler design to encourage all posts to go on the wall of the Page. Facebook has changed the way they measure impressions, making it more important that your wall and photos are viewed and interacted with and not posted from a third party application. If you don't have high levels of impressions, your updates will not show up in the news feeds of your fans even if they have liked the Page.
After you launch the Page don't forget to promote it and encourage your audience to 'Like' your Page, so all your hard work pays off.
