Facebook as a Community Outreach Tool

Do you have a Facebook account?  Millions do.  But if you’re waiting for the right time, you may be passing up lots of great community information that your network and current friends are posting now.

More rural areas such as where I live in central Idaho, may be slower to adopt Facebook as a communication tool, simply because of the lack of broadband networks that are prominent in the bigger cities.  With faster speeds such as the 3G and 4G networks, many commuters and city dwellers use their Blackberry PDA’s, IPhones and other handheld devices to post information at any time.  (we hope they don’t do this behind the steering wheel of a vehicle, but common sense is applicable in all forms of life).

This blog I am typing right now will be posted to my website – which is a wordpress blog.  I will then use the Share plugin that has been installed to every article I post, to share this article with my Facebook account.  I can also quickly share it with my Twitter account.  Perhaps I will identify one or two of the other social networking tools to share my articles with, such as Digg and Stumbleupon.  I just haven’t had the time to focus on those other popular applications yet.

The topic of this post is meant to help people in my own community to become observant of the power that Facebook can yield for community type activities, bulletins and events.   Lots of people mention to me, just in passing, that they do monitor the Facebook postings that I have added over time and therefore, I have a sense that while it may not be a primary focus of any one particular set of people, that the information is noted.

If you are reading this post but have not taken the step to include Facebook in your repetoire of digital communities, perhaps this article will encourage you to recognize that Facebook is going mainstream.  All of the news channels have recently setup Facebook Fan Pages and using this social media tool to generate huge numbers of comments and discussions on issues that are communicated on their television news channels.  The way that social media and Facebook in particular is rapidly evolving, its an area of the digital landscape I definitely want to take part in, understand and in turn, help my customers and community to also see the positive side.