We had an interesting challenge this month in Digino – our client, Treasury Holdings, wanted to create a space online that allow the community groups in the Dublin 1 area to promote, share and engage with everyone living, working or trading in the area. Clearly, Facebook was the perfect medium for this project.
That was the need. Also important to the client was that the content and engagement was ‘real’, that active members of the physical community had a clear and relevant presence in the virtual space. We kicked off with a workshop to define the stakeholders and map out a content strategy that would ensure the right people would not only be exposed to the page, but be encouraged to Like, post, comment and share through it.
First of all we created the page, grabbed a few staff likes and created a Custom URL. You’d be surprised at how many business pages forget to do this. The automatic URL generated by Facebook was
www.facebook.com/pages/Spencer-Dock-Community/151875261555116
While our custom selection was
www.facebook.com/SpencerDockCommunity
Currently, Facebook won’t let you change the automatic name until you have over 25 ‘Likes’ and you can only change it once, so double check your spelling.
Our next step was to design a Custom Welcome Tab.
We needed to clearly show in a small space, the diversity and culture of the area, while conveying a strong incentive to like the page. We set this to be the default landing page for those who had yet to like the page, with the Wall as the default page for those who had already seen and liked.
For the creative, we used a dynamic ‘polaroid’ style with images that move and zoom as you mouse over. We thought it looked a bit quirky – and as Facebook can be limiting on the style and design side, we wanted to use the opportunity of a custom tab to make the page really stand out.
One of the criticisms of the page is that the welcome tab is not HTTPS compliant. Custom welcome tabs are possible because Facebook enabled i-frames earlier this year. The tab is actually hosted on a site elsewhere, and an i-frame allows you to see it on the Facebook page. The site that hosts the tab really should to have an SSL cert. Without it, those who choose to surf Facebook securely will not be able to see the Welcome page. However, as the budget for the project was very low, we made do without an SSL cert.
Once the page was created, we worked with the client to populate it with interesting, relevant and engaging content. We helped map out a content strategy for the future, and we reached out to stakeholders with a Facebook presence and empowered them to share information, images and events. We then trained the client to administer their page. We showed them how to make status updates, share events, upload video, tag images, and how to read their on page analytics.
After the first week, while we were still adding content, we had reached 100 likes, and after a week or two of engagement this had doubled. Metrics for the success of this simple project were likes, shares and comments. Within the first week there have been 200 likes for the page, and we’re looking forward to watching that grow over time.
