It’s amazing what a little branding scare will do to ignite change in a large public institution. For what has seemed like years Mizzou’s Facebook presence has been seriously lacking in an official capacity. There were many reasons: hesitancy by administration, lack of staff for support, lack of content, fear of the unknown, etc. All of those reasons (which amount to excuses) held us back. That was, until Facebook announced they’d be providing users and pages with the option to create vanity urls. We mentioned to administration the fear of others snatching up ‘Mizzou’ or ‘University of Missouri’ as names and we were off to the races!
Suddenly, we were thrust into the social media world with a vengeance. Our official news sites (Mizzou Wire and the MU News Bureau) have had Twitter accounts for a few months now as well as Facebook pages and we now had the green light for the university to have its own page.
Points we kept in mind
With as much planning as we could muster on such short notice we moved forward. Here are a few of the guidelines we started with:
Standing out - I designed the stacked MU logo to fit within the Facebook layout, but also stand out and make it obvious we were the official Mizzou page. There are quite a few Mizzou imposters out there and so we used the term ‘official’ in the box of ambiguity to try and make it clear as well as reporting them to Facebook.
Posting schedule - This was a concern of mine starting out. We wanted to post high-quality, high-level, campus-wide stories on our wall that would generate buzz for the page and drive people there; and ultimately to our campus sites. We made sure to front load the page with a few nice, recent stories to make it seem like we weren’t just getting started. As for the schedule, we have decided to have one story post and one ‘Photo of the Day’ post per day. That way we’re not inundating users and hogging up their feeds. We’re still trying to hone when we’ll post each one. From yesterday’s traffic it seemed like more users were coming to the site in the early afternoon; that’s when we saw a spike in new fans. Maybe we’ll post one in the late morning, one in the early afternoon? This is where we’re learning.
Discussion boards - one goal we have is to not make the page a ‘we feed you’ endeavor. We would like it to become a place where the discussion is a two-way street. We’ve added a few Admission-y discussion boards and expect to put more as we go. We’re also open to posting statuses that get people to come and comment, but again, we’re concerned about flooding news feeds. Does anybody have examples of appropriate usage in this regard?
Questions for you
There’s much more to come. We’re committed to making this work. Obviously, it’s not the end-all-be-all of our web presence but if we’re going to do it we want to do it right, and be the best we can be at it. We want to know from you:
Events- We’d like to add events soon, pulling the most important events from the campus. I personally would like to take advantage of the best analytics that exist for Facebook so I’m open to that. What are some nice analytics sites that work for Facebook?
Drivers - We’re driving people there from the homepage audience gateways and I’m looking forward to looking at the numbers on that. Our office staff has been promoting the page from our personal Twitter accounts, as well as from IM and word-of-mouth and e-mail. What other ways can you think of?
More, more more - I’m also looking forward to taking advantage of the Static FBML application where we can. It seems like that’s the best way to personalize the page and really stand out, which we’re really trying to do.
Join us!
We have nearly 300 users in just over 24 hours, so we’re pleased. If you haven’t already, join us on Facebook. Even if you aren’t an alum we’d love to have you take part in the discussion.
Leave a comment
Note: Comments are moderated. If published, comments may be edited for length, style and clarity.