Last week, the News & Media team at Leeds Met built and launched the University’s official Facebook page. Most of the staff within the team have their own personal Facebook profiles, but the creation of an official page for Leeds Met raises a lot of interesting questions. Last week, the News & Media team at Leeds Met built and launched the University’s official Facebook page. Most of the staff within the team have their own personal Facebook profiles, but the creation of an official page for Leeds Met raises a lot of interesting questions. 
One of these, which is probably bedevilling many organisations, including universities, with their own Facebook presence, is what’s the point of it? What value does having a Facebook page add to an institution? There are many viewpoints on this, but they can be split into two broad camps – those that think social media is the preserve of personal, private communication, ‘me-time’, and those who believe that Facebook, and whatever social networking sites inevitably succeed it, is worth exploring as a means of corporate communication. Proponents of the first view would argue that the presence of corporate pages on social networking sites is embarrassingly incongruous, that attempting to transmit a corporate message is somehow against the ethos of what Facebook has to offer. Anyone who studies the site in some detail will note the presence of paid-for advertising – the site is itself a business, whatever some of its end-users may believe.
For a professional creator of web content, the experience of creating a presence on Facebook is frustrating. The site offers limited customisation, so there is a depressing homogeneity to most of its pages, groups and profile. This approach works for YouTube, but in this case, you can compare the site (appropriately enough) to a television set. YouTube doesn’t allow its channel creators a great deal of customisation, because, really, it isn’t wanted. The site frames a great deal of varied content. The space for self-expression exists in the YouTube player, not what surrounds it. For the average user of Facebook, the same experience holds true, but starts to break down when more advanced users wish to add a degree of differentiation to their groups or fan pages. We can only hope that if the site continues to grow in popularity, then its owners will allow users greater latitude on how they present their content.
This last point raises a knotty question. At the most basic level, avoiding words like stakeholder and segmentation, if you wish to communicate to a group of people who are interested in what you do/say/have to offer, then how can you function in an environment where the capacity to design and create a truly individual presence is circumscribed? Because Facebook is so limited when it comes to creating highly-customised pages, how can you represent your institution to the absolute best of your ability? The answer is that you can’t – but at least everyone else is in the same boat. There are no great, overarching strategies in place for higher education establishments wishing to grow their presence on Facebook, because the limitations militate so severely against this. All we can do is work with what Facebook allows us, and that’s pretty much restricted to useful links, news updates and a handful of other applications.
Then why bother having a Facebook page? The simple answer is that the site has now attained such a ubiquity, that as a university, you can’t afford not to. Everyone, seemingly, is on Facebook. It is not longer the preserve of the young, and/or technologically savvy. And because the site is multivalent in its appeal, it makes sense that anyone trying to reach a heterogeneous audience should use it. To reiterate, there are no established strategies for using Facebook as the official mouthpiece of an organisation. Sometimes it’s important, and valid, to embrace a technological or cultural movement just to see what happens. Yes, Facebook is new and untried as a medium for corporate expression. So too, was the whole internet, at one stage.
CN.
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