I noticed this recent post over at TPM and it got me to thinking about Facebook and what we do here. Like our friend Micah over at Life After Mormonism, I’ve been playing around with Facebook ads, trying to get a feel for how much bang they deliver for the buck, and I’ve pretty much concluded that smart money would probably forego extended long-term FB advertising in favor of building useful FB fan pages, unless there’s a topical “hook” that an FB ad could exploit to generate a one-time traffic surge (and considering the daily headlines about BYU, Romney, Broadway, etc., there’s ample material for crafting effective, topical, short-run FB ads, but there’s no way to automate that kind of creative activity).
So anyway, I’m admittedly new to this and still don’t know what makes the most sense when it comes to leveraging FB to build community and support the activity that’s dearest to my heart, namely the long-form written expression that remains the forte of the personal blogging scene.
In the meantime, I’d like to ask for your help with an initial Facebook push. All I’m asking is that you “like” the pages below. Once we’ve achieved 25 “likes” we’ll be able to convert the URLs for these fan pages to an easily-remembered format ( e.g., the following URL is now golden thanks to the assistance of FB friends: http://www.facebook.com/Mormon.Alumni ).
Main Street Plaza “like” box:
Disaffected Mormon Underground “like” box:
Outer Blogness “like” box:
I’m particularly keen to find out if “Outer Blogness” can live up to its promise over on Facebook. I’ve plugged in all the RSS feeds for the Outer Blogness blogs that Chanson has painstakingly compiled over the years here at MSP, and I’m curious to see if that fan page can now function like a glorified Facebook version of Google Reader (with the added bonus that once you “like” this Facebook iteration of Outer Blogness, the result will be that all that Outer Blogness goodness will be syndicated across Facebook via your News Feed). Right? I only ask because it’s entirely possible that I’ve misunderstood how that all works, but that’s my understanding. But if I’m right, that rocks. No more need to manually post exmo content to my Facebook page, it’ll just magically appear. Or so I’m supposing.
Whether I’m right or not, please spare a moment to “like” all the above. But I hope I’m right. Because you Outer Bloggers deserve to be read. At the end of the day, as far as I can tell, it’s all about hearts, minds and eyeballs. Sorry if this is all a bit tedious, but today I happen to be mostly thinking about how to best capture that last pair of organs.
Thanks to all who helped us qualify for this nifty Facebook URL:
http://www.facebook.com/Main.Street.Plaza
You rock!
By the way, the new Facebook URL for the r/exmormon subreddit is:
http://www.facebook.com/Exmormon.Redditors
Now all that’s left is to get facebook.com/damu and facebook.com/outer.blogness registered. Please continue to help “like” those two pages,thanks!So cool!!! I don’t Facebook much, but I “liked” all of the above, and I’ll try out the Outer Blogness page. 😀
I lik that my “I Have Quit Facebook” blog post is in the Outer Blogness box.
I don’t like that the day after I set up a quartet of new FB fan pages, I’ve got no way to see any of them, and even the Outer Blogness blogroll here at MSP doesn’t work for me.
Big shout out to the waxworks in Beijing.
What gets posted at the Mormon Alumni page? It seems that it’s just a regurgitation of the r/exmormon subreddit.
Kari – I’ll clean up this post and add details about which feeds autopost to which FB fan pages. At the moment, I’m behind the great firewall of China, so I’ll revisit this next week. In the meantime, I’d say the “Outer Blogness” fan page is the one truly useful aggregation. Admittedly, the others really are mostly just regurgitation and I plan on replacing the MAA badge on the front page here with a Facebook “Outer Blogness” badge.