Case of the Week (Social Media | Aug 2-8, 2010): Facebook Community Building

We are pleased to present ‘Case of the Week’ initiative (launched on our community on Facebook) to help you acquire relevant and practical skills about various facets of Digital Marketing. Participating in ‘Case of the Week’ will be a great structure for you to continuously stimulate your thoughts and learning about Digital Marketing. We are starting with a case on ‘Social Media Community Building’:

Community Building on Social Media

Imagine you are the Admin of a 100,000+ strong community on Facebook. You’ve got a Breaking News to share. You’ve two options:
a.) Share the news as an Admin… or
b.) Have one of the community members break the news

What will you choose and why?

Answer: As expected, we saw lots of people choosing option (b.). Given that ‘Communities’ are all about ‘By the people, For the people’, the choice b looks quite natural and obvious. However, if you look at the mechanics of ‘Friend Feed’ (i.e. who and how many people see a message on their News/Friend feed), you will realize that the answer should be (a). Here is the explanation:

If you let a community member (who may have few hundred friends), release the breaking news, the message will be visible to his friends or the people who’ll visit the community. However, if the admin announce the news, it will be posted on to the News Feed of over 100,000 people (i.e. entire community). Thus, the chances of that message to cause engagement will be exponentially higher. If you look at any large community (e.g. Unexplored India), you will always see that any message posted by the brand, will always have very high degree of engagement (likes n comments) compared to a similar message posted by a fan.

At the same time, you should continuously encourage the community members to contribute n participate in the community so as to attract participation from other members of the community.

We hope you find this relevant and useful. If you would like to continuous engage in such cases about Digital Marketing, join us and follow us at our Digital Marketing Learning Community on Facebook. Please feel free to share your inputs and interest areas.