The mighty Facebook now has over 175 million members and is the most popular social networking site worldwide receiving more visitors than MySpace and Twitter. It’s about connecting and interacting with people all over the place. Users can join networks organised by city, workplace, college, region, hobby….whatever! You add friends to build up your own little network and can send messages, set up events and tag your mates and colleagues in photos.
So how can having a Facebook page benefit your radio station?
Well you can promote what you do and the programmes that you broadcast to a whole new online audience. If your Facebook-savvy volunteers add the station as a friend they may encourage their own friends to take a look at the station site therefore increasing your potential audience. If you are organising a station event you can set up a special page with all the relevant information and send invitations out to friends. You could use the site to exchange ideas about new programmes by asking people to write comments on your wall. And maybe you’ve been recording down at a community event and have taken snaps of volunteers doing interviews and vox pops. You can easily add these to your Facebook page highlighting all the fun that was had. And if you tag the volunteers that were down at the event in these photos the images will also feature on their profile pages maximising your exposure.
Facebook can also be useful in unveiling contacts and business opportunities. Say you join your city or towns network. Local businesses and organisations may also be members of that network and may be thinking about new ways of marketing. Your presence in this network may bring you advertising and marketing work from businesses that had not considered you before.
So how do you get started?
All you need to do is visit www.facebook.com and sign yourself up for a free account. Some community radio stations have a general Facebook page for the station itself while others have different Facebook pages for different programmes. The choice is yours. Here are some to check out –
Wayland Community Radio Facebook Page
The Basement Show on Pure Radio Facebook Page
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