Should Your Organization Be on Facebook? A Framework, Not a Bandwagon

The question has reached every marketing meeting we attend, usually around minute forty: should we be on Facebook? It displaced last year’s MySpace version of itself sometime this spring. Facebook’s user counts made the trade press, and its May ‘platform’ announcement made the business press.

The honest answer, the one that survives past the meeting, depends entirely on who you are trying to reach. That makes it a strategy question, not a technology question.

What changed, and why the question is louder now

Two developments turned a campus phenomenon into a boardroom topic. Last September, Facebook opened registration beyond schools. Anyone with an email address can join, and millions have. The network is past thirty million active users, and the growth keeps speeding up.

Then in May, at an event called F8, Facebook launched its platform. Outside developers can now build applications that live inside Facebook itself, and hundreds have, with some gathering remarkable user numbers in weeks.

The platform move is the strategically interesting one. Facebook is positioning itself not as a website but as an environment. Content, applications, and marketing all happen inside its walls, on its terms. Whether that ambition holds is one of the bigger open questions in digital marketing, and we do not pretend to know the answer. What we can do is sort the decision for organizations facing it this summer.

The framework: audience first, features second

For colleges and universities, the math is nearly settled. Your next three admissions classes live on Facebook daily. It was built for them, on their campuses. Adoption among American college students is close to total. The question is not whether to have a presence but what kind. Prospective students researching your school will search for it there. Current students are already forming unofficial groups wearing your name. Meet your audience where they are, but bring the relationship home.

The etiquette matters enormously. This is the students’ space, and institutions that show up sounding like brochures get the reception brochures get at parties. Show up as people: admissions staff answering real questions, current students sharing honestly. The universities doing this well look less like marketers and more like good hosts.

For nonprofits, the case is promising but unproven. The audiences exist, since Facebook’s users now stretch well past campus. But they are in personal-life mode, and the network’s tools for causes are early. Groups cost nothing and can rally real supporters. The experiments worth running are small. Start a group for your actual community, staffed by someone who will tend it. Measure it by what it produces: volunteers, attendees, addresses for the email list you own.

For B2B companies, patience. Your buyers are on Facebook as parents, fans, and college friends, not as procurement officers. The network’s professional-context tools are essentially absent. Watch, claim your name if it matters to you, and spend the energy on channels where your buyers are working rather than living. LinkedIn is the professional network worth a parallel look, and a different post.

Experiment-sized investment, defined

Where the framework says yes-or-maybe, the investment discipline matters more than the enthusiasm. Our definition of experiment-sized: a named owner spending single-digit hours weekly. A stated hypothesis, like ‘this group will produce inquiries from admitted students.’ Tagged links so your analytics can credit whatever arrives. And a review date, one semester or two quarters out. That is when the experiment either earns expansion or gets closed without embarrassment.

What disqualifies an effort from experiment status: ‘everyone’s doing it’ as the hypothesis, an intern as the owner, and no review date. That is how organizations collect the digital equivalent of gym memberships.

And the rule for every platform: build on property you own. Facebook is a rented room, and the lease terms change without notice. The presence you build there should point back to your site, your email list, your relationships. Groups that exist to feed the owned channels are strategy. Presences that exist to exist are decor.

The advertising and measurement layer, as it stands

Since someone in your meeting will ask about ads: the current inventory is thin. Facebook’s ‘Flyers’ are cheap display units targeted by profile. They get the engagement rates you would expect from ads in a social space, which is to say low. Sponsored-group deals exist at prices that make sense mainly for consumer brands buying reach.

The interesting asset is the targeting data underneath. Users here volunteer their age, school, location, and interests. In principle, that data could aim advertising with unusual precision. Whether Facebook builds products that turn that principle into performance is one of the tells we are watching. The demographic riches are real. The ad formats have not earned them yet, and ‘the targeting will be amazing someday’ is not a media plan.

Measurement requires modest cleverness now. Facebook offers organizations essentially no analytics, so instrument the borders. Tag every link that leads from your Facebook presence to your site. Count the things a group can be seen to produce, like RSVPs and joins, as leading indicators, not outcomes. The outcomes happen on property you control, which is convenient, because that is also where your measurement lives.

If a semester of honest measurement shows the experiment feeding nothing, that is not failure. That is the experiment working as designed, and the review meeting writes itself.

What we’re watching for

Three tells will sharpen this framework over the next year. Whether Facebook ships real tools for organizations, since the current group mechanics are borrowed clothes. Whether the expansion holds engagement, because thirty million registered means less than it seems if the post-college crowd visits monthly. And whether the advertising products mature into something with measurable conversion rather than measured impressions.

A last word on tone for anyone proceeding. The organizations succeeding in these spaces write like people, because the medium punishes anything else. The admissions group that answers at 10 p.m. in a human voice builds something the polished press release never will. If your approval chain cannot produce a same-day reply in conversational English, fix that before joining any network. It is the actual capability these platforms test, and no framework substitutes for it.