5 fundamental things journalists must understand about Facebook
Facebook isn’t new on the block, but it often doesn't get the respect it deserves. Education editor Melanie Coulson explains why you shouldn’t/can’t still be ignoring Facebook when it comes to connecting with your audience, and what you need to know.
By Melanie Coulson, Education editor
I’m not denying that Twitter is sexy. Something about those 140 characters is so alluring. Perhaps it’s the challenge of displaying wit and intellect in a soundbite.
I love Twitter, don’t get me wrong.
But I also find it interesting that during conversations I’ve had with people (journalists, politicos, public relations/communications professionals) about social media, they think Twitter first. There’s no doubt that there are some key influencers on Twitter.
The New York Times’ David Carr recently said at a Boston University recent conference on narrative: ‘Being big on Twitter is like being big in Japan. You can’t use it as a metric of your actual reach.’
Twitter may be a sexy flirt, but Facebook is a player. Put plainly, there are more people are on Facebook. Heck, you can reach my mother on Facebook – and she still doesn’t get twitter.
Suprisingly, when I ask people their Facebook strategy, they most often say ‘we’re still working on it.’
Facebook isn’t new on the block – but I just don’t think we give it the respect it deserves. Here’s why you shouldn’t/can’t still be ignoring Facebook when it comes to connecting with your audience, and what you need to know:
1. Fish where the fish are. Facebook has more than 1-billion active users. Canadians are on Facebook in a huge way. Of the more than 28-million internet users in the country, roughly 18 million Canadians, or 63.54 per cent, were on Facebook according to Internet World Stats.
2. Know your audience. Looking at Canadian Facebook demographics, the largest growth lately has been recorded in the 45-54 age group. But the largest demographic on Facebook is much younger – 25 per cent of total users in Canada are between ages 25-34. Another 24 per cent are between 18-24, according to a May, 2012 report in Cantech Letter. Fifty-four per cent of Canadian Facebook users are female, 46 per cent male.
3. Engagement isn’t just about being liked. It’s important to have as many page likes as possible, as this extends your reach into the Facebook feeds of your ‘fans.’ However, fans aren’t the main metric to judge a Facebook page by, as it only shows how many people are subscribed to your page (think mass distribution of flyers).
A better measurement is engagements (likes, shares, comments), but each of these actions broadens the reach of a post exponentially.
To continue reading, please go the Melanie Coulson's website where this was originally published.
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Tamara Baluja is an award-winning journalist with CBC Vancouver and the 2018 Michener-Deacon fellow for journalism education. She was the associate editor for J-Source from 2013-2014.