I know what you might be thinking: “If I hear anything more about college and Facebook I’m going to chop my ears off and go into PR.”

Reality is, Facebook is the new beer. Actually that is an understatement. I’m pretty sure that the top two things that would piss my generation off the most would be the reinstitution of the draft and if someone took away our Facebook.

Hyperbole aside, college newspapers have a built in marketing system in place that ALL of their readers are already a part of, so why not take advantage of it? Here is how:

Create a “business” page.

Although currently limited in its use, the “business” page of Facebook allows “fans” to rate and upload media related to your product. Facebook even gives you a discussion board. I recently just created a page for The Temple News, and am fooling around with ways to use it.

How do I do this?

Well, first go to the “create a business page” erm… page. The rest is filling out fields and uploading pictures. The business page as it stands now is currently a crippled version of the personal profile page. You can rearrange boxes and add applications, however not every application works with the business page.

To know whether an application will work when you go to add it you will see these buttons:

Be sure to hit “Add to Page”, otherwise you will do what I did and have a whole bunch of useless apps on your profile page. I am warning you that the search function for the Page applications is terrible. There is an “App for pages” section but when you try to search for anything specific it searches EVERY app making finding the right app a painful process of opening each one and checking if it has the above button.

The holy grail for the College Newspaper would be an RSS import feature like “Notes” which currently doesn’t work with profiles. So for now we are regulated to simply establishing a presence, manually (!) uploading videos, and trying to foster reader discussion. I still believe that the business page on Facebook needs a little bit more work before it is useful to newspapers though. If anything, it is another way to connect to your readers and community, and thats not bad for a few minutes of setup.

Oh and become a fan of the Temple News

Author RSS import

Speaking of RSS feeds, the most useful thing I have used facebook for is the Notes feature. Using Notes, anybody can import an RSS feed to blast their friends. If you can swing an author RSS feed, have reporters enter their author RSS feed as notes and you will start to see the clicks come poring in from their friends. I don’t have to tell you how this can drastically improve your reach as a newspaper. Plus readers can comment on the note as well as on your site so the author can get semi-private direct feedback.

How do I do this?

The following directions are good if you have a Wordpress blog, which is the only CMS I can think of on the top of my head that college newspapers would use that has author feeds.

1. Find a post you have written on your blog
2. Click your name
3. Look at the URL and add “/feed” to the end. For example: “ http://domain.com/author/username/feed“
4. Copy that URL into Word/Notepad and hold on to it.
5. Go to “http://yournetwork.facebook.com/editnotes.php “
6. You’ll see a text field. Paste the link you put in word which should look like “http://domain.com/author/YOURNAMEHERE/feed “
7. Click “start importing”
8. In the upper right hand corner click “Confirm import”
9. Set it and forget it.

Advertising

Facebook ads are cheap and they work. We used them to launch our blog Broad and Cecil. But I already told you about that…

There are probably other ways to use Facebook, but for now these are the most obvious. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t do this. The fact that this all takes about 20 minutes of work for such a long term benefit should put this high on your “to do” list tomorrow.