Starting a Facebook Group – Build it Up From There

The Journal Gazette, in Fort Wayne Indiana has 71 fans on Facebook. How many does your newspaper have? Right now I wouldn’t argue that they are "beat blogging." Whether or not they realize it, however, they are gaining a critical edge in that practice: Contacts. The more contacts you can garner – the more you can reach out and contact at any one time.

I caught up with Ariel Anthony, one of the Journal Gazette’s reporters who helped to build and maintain their Facebook presence.

What’s the history behind this move?

It got started when we had a meeting [in November] about our own website, the Journalgazette.net, to see if we were on the right track to using the website to its full potential. We discussed ideas we can implement now and in the near future to make it a trusted site to people in the area. We realize more people are getting their news on the internet than the newspaper or television, so we want to take advantage of that.

In that meeting Emily Orgman suggested that we take part in the social networking sites out there, there is no denying that those are some of the most popular on the internet. The initial idea was to use MySpace, but we encountered a few problems based on MySpace’s rules whether we were allowed to have a page there — so to avoid any legal complications we avoided that route.

Then we came across the function on Facebook where companies can have profiles and collect fans. This is around mid-January and after that we started building the page – planning what we wanted to do and make our mission clearer for people who wanted to be in the newsroom.

What’s the purpose of the page?

We want to reach out to the younger readers. Using Facebook we are able to put our content out there in a venue that younger web surfers or potential readers are familiar with and know the features of. If we can go to our potential readers, instead of hoping they come to us, we can become that trusted source for them.

We also want to spur discussion on the site. It’s fairly new and not too many people know about it, but we’ve had a few topics on there that had some discussion. We want to encourage people to go on there, see something they like and comment on it and then help us gauge what our younger readers are looking for.

What have you found so far in terms of numbers?

As far as things like web traffic to our own site, we haven’t been able to measure that yet, we will have to see what stories we post on our Facebook page and count the hits from one day to the next. If we see a jump in hits for that story on the second day — its likely that Facebook is reason.
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Kudos on getting it started quick. Right now it’s a small community – you haven’t even promoted it yet. When will you launch in full?

We don’t have a specific date, we haven’t actually had our grand kick-off yet. We put it up there, we have some of our own friends on there and attracted some local fans, what we want to do sometime soon is start advertising this in the paper and start hitting up some of the local college campuses.

How are you managing this?

Right now we have a two-person team Emily and myself. We are trying to come up with a team of 4-5 people. It only takes two hours total per week between the two of us that work on it and that right now. It could be just because there isn’t a lot of activity. If our page gets popular we expect to have to monitor content on there to make sure offensive things aren’t staying on there. Down the line that might be where more of our resources go. As of now its only been a couple hours a week.

Got any advice for newspapers interested in this space?

You get out of it what you put into it. Right now we are really trying to plan out what’s going to show up on that site, what we want to get out of our visitors and readers. As far as time, it doesn’t take a lot of our resources. That’s partially because Facebook has a lot of features that are easy to manage and easy to use. I recommend it to other papers to at least try out it can’t hurt to get their content out there.

It would be a good forum for a certain sub-section of our readers, we wouldn’t expect to get feedback from all types of web users through Facebook.  Hopefully the younger readers, the readers who might not care about the newspaper otherwise, will get involved and start saying their peace. We are hoping that people’s names and photos showing up with their comments will keep them from abusing the website as far as giving us feedback, but it’s so early in the process..

If people are curious about us, to get the whole experience of what we are doing and trying to do, they should come to our Facebook page and sign up as a fan, get the daily updates.

You site mail daily? Is that too much?

The advantage of Facebook’s company pages is that as opposed to spam or other types of unwanted messages it comes over Facebook in a different folder than your inbox, it comes in your updates. Those don’t keep filling up. If you are a fan of the journal you get one email that constantly updates, but doesn’t fill up your inbox with messages.