Here’s to hoping we’re likeable enough to earn your Facebook support.

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.