How Useful is Facebook?

[Gross]

I've had a conversation about Facebook & it's usefulness in publicity. My view being that social media (FB & Twitter etc) offer a great platform for promoting a modern, vibrant sport and that many (particularly younger) people don't use standard websites as 5 or 10 years ago...

Opposing view was that Facebook produces crap, short comments & websites are best....

Views?

[oo_wrong_way]

Wind the clock back a few years and we could have the same conversation (in a pub) about the usefulness of an online forum or perhaps an email newsletter. Times change, technology moves on. In my view it is worth embracing social media as a communication and marketing tool, alongside more traditional methods.

Facebook seems to be quite adept at keeping groups of like-minded people in touch - creating an orienteering event on Facebook these days won't generate much interest - but perhaps it will one day. And when it does the opportunities for car sharing, last minute event announcements, online entries, results, etc open up for all.

Whatever your view, one thing is certain. The use of smart phones to browse the internet is increasing and most orienteering club websites do not look good on a smart phone. And don't even try to use the BO site. Both Facebook and Twitter are very easy on a phone.

It is also very easy to create a Club page on Facebook and this can facilitate many more contributions from grass roots club members to the online discussion.

[Paul Frost]

Whatever your view, one thing is certain. The use of smart phones to browse the internet is increasing and most orienteering club websites do not look good on a smart phone.

Depends on who built the site, every site I've built recently should cope with most devices, except perhaps old feature phones.
I'm completely in the camp that reckons that the majority of web surfing will be done on mobile type devices in the very near future. So any website that isn't designed with that in mind is going to loose out.

[Paul Frost]

Does the lack of responses indicate that Nope is not social enough any more?

I have been thinking for a while now about how to find out the level of Facebook & Twitter usage amongst orienteers.
I had thought about asking here on Nope but suspected that it was not a truly representative section of the total. The recent CompassSport & Nope web polls get a tiny number of participants, sometimes only a few dozen or less.

Perhaps it needs a combined attack on all the media channels to get a full picture. An article in CompassSport & Focus an email to all British Orienteering members, tweets and posts on Facebook, with them all pointing to a simple online survey form (and a snail mail option?). Then share that knowledge with the whole community to see if we can improve this whole communication thing.
Now where can I find all that spare time I thought I had ?

For those interested in the detail Paul Boag wrote this interesting article about how social media and websites could play nicely together.

[Scott]

The "SLOW Members" group on Facebook is certainly very active. Admittedly part of the reason for it's relative success will be due to the pre-existing demographics of the club, but it's also an effective way to get new members feeling involved in the social side of the club.

If you're considering social media use in orienteering, it's also worth mentioning Attackpoint - not so much for the America-centric discussion threads, but for the comments on people's log pages.

[FRBlackSheep]

It really does depend on whose running your website - SLOWs is a very good example of one that works perfectly on the smart phone - a credit to Mr Obriens skills in that area.

With facebook it's true that SLOW does have a very active membership - this has developed over time and actually for publicity purposes outside of the club is fairly limited - what SLOW does have is a 'open' page which promotes the club and advertises the events and a 'closed' group which members request to joing and has a much more wide ranging content.

Facebook to me isn't fantastic at bringing in new memberships, but does when they are on the perifery already mean that it is much easier for them to interact with the club and get to know what is going on in a simple manner which allows them to choose how much contact they have.

In a nutshell in a sport where we spend long periods of time alone in the foreat and when it can be difficult to co-ordinate a means to meet up as everyone runs at different time - facebook enables a feeling of community to be developed in a much easier and smoother way than traditionally speaking.

[SeanC]

There's a few good things about using social media (Facebook, Twitter etc) for orienteering publicity.

- It's free - unless you try and use the advertising and even then you can do micropayments of a few pounds.
- The demographics seem to be the opposite of local newspaper readers (ie mainly under 40's, less over 40's), exactly the group we are short of in the sport.
- We control the message - no need to worry about journalists twisting the press release.

Unless you're going down the paying for advertising route, it seems to be an enhanced version of "word of mouth" publicity.. ie get members to tell your friends, get newcomers to tell their friends. We know word of mouth brings in a few people and friends of people who like outdoor activities are more likely to like orienteering, so a facebook page is definately worth doing.

But I'm wondering for my small club how could we make it an active facebook page? There aren't many members, yet alone the young members that are likely to be facebook addicts. Maybe we could replace our google groups email discussion group that is used 2 or 3 times a month (mainly by me to publicise events within my own club) but that might not be popular with the majority who don't have facebook accounts? The more active it is the more effective it is as a form of advertising and probably more importantly to help to make people feel welcome to the sport.

I'm wondering whether facebook pages based on location rather than clubs might be better? Eg one for London, one for Kent, one for Essex etc? In London at any rate there is great overlap between clubs. eg SLOW and DFOK members live in north London, there are CHIG (Chigwell, NE London) members living in Croydon (far south of London), I live in neighbouring club Saxons territory etc. Whatever the club, we all mix in the pub after evening events and location based facebook pages might help people get to know each other and arrange lifts, especially the younger members who are marooned in clubs made up of mainly older people. Probably this distracts from the aim of advertising a club, but if you're in a region that's not got many club facebook pages it might be worth thinking about?

Anyway, one of our members is setting up/has set up a Twitter account. If you're a Twitterer you can follow @DartfordOK. He's intending to tweet stuff on the way home on the train. Facebook I can get my head round, but Twitter does confuse.

[frog]

I have twitter and facebook but just post on facebook a couple of times a week and twitter hardly ever, I mainly use twitter to see what famous people or the better orienteers are up to. I don't have a fancy phone though so use both on my computer.
I'm not really into telling people "I did x today" which seems to be what twitter in particular and facebook to an extent are about. I'd rather have an argument/ discussion about something.
I have never got into something through twitter or facebook and just use them to keep in touch with things I'm already interested in.
Websites are much more useful for telling you about a club.

[Lucy.F.]

Interesting topic - personally I use Facebook quite a bit because it's easy to communicate with people - especially when it comes to organising events as you can 'invite' people. For example we've just set up one for BUCS - it's not intended to be the main site for BUCS information but within a day we had people invited/attending from a number of different universities. Therefore as an awareness tool I've found it to work well.
However, a different experience is that being in a club entirely of 'young people' (EUOC) we very rarely used Facebook and instead used our two email lists. But then that is a rather small club.
So I suppose it will just work differently with different people/clubs but definitely worth using as it's free!

[lucy]

Isn't it all about doing a number of different things to catch a wide range of people. I like facebook and Twitter, but it certainly isnt the solution to everything and does take a while to build up steam. It is very simple and gets the message across and can only become more useful. Also it can include new volunteers ie young volunteers in running part of the clubs publicity and help them get more involved in running the club earlier which can never be a bad thing. Do you you have a social networking role on your committee?

I would love to know about anyone using the advertising facility, and the impact it did or didnt have.

Please feel free to join us www.facebook.com/cornwallorienteering and www.twitter.com/cornwalloc

[HarryO]

I'm more into F/B too. Started as a way to keep in touch with old friends (a bit like Friends Reunited) then moved into sharing holiday pics with friends and family. Now I also use it for interests and hobbies - such as orienteering.
Not really into Twitter - get invited to follow some really weird stuff (and extremely sexually explicit!) - so am even thinking of de-registering. Can't have the kids reading that sort of stuff!

[Paul Frost]

I'm not really into telling people "I did x today" which seems to be what twitter in particular and facebook to an extent are about. I'd rather have an argument/ discussion about something.
...Websites are much more useful for telling you about a club.

This is how I see the social networks, great for a quick one sentence comment but no good for a proper discussion. They also don't have the navigational structure to store content that you might want to refer to at a future date, it's all about now.

Another possible problem with using it as a channel for communication is that not everyone has a Facebook account. Many pages are not even visible unless you sign in, so you will be excluding some people from your content.

I have yet to see any good examples of Facebook club pages that are much more than an instant message board and a bit of photo sharing (but not much). That's not to say that a message board is a bad idea, but it can be a dead end as there is nowhere else to go.
If you were on a club website (which could have a message board/comments/forum) you could then browse around the future event list, maps, results, interesting articles, training/coaching resources etc.

But I guess Facebook etc. satisfy the instant hit, short attention span that much of society seems to have moved to.

[seabird]

I had completely forgotten that I was signed up to my club's longstanding facebook page.

Went back and took a look. It was lightly busy in 2006/7. Scarcely anything in 2008/9. And a few isolated postings in 2010/11. Not really working as a communication vehicle.

We now have twitter on the club website but many of the messages people are posting need to be split. Orienteers seem too wordy for twitter.

We have used googlegroups as one means of discussion with limited success. There is a regular hotmail mailing to all club members - but that is one way communication.

[DJM]

Paul Frost wrote:

I'm completely in the camp that reckons that the majority of web surfing will be done on mobile type devices in the very near future. So any website that isn't designed with that in mind is going to loose out.

This prompted me to have a look at what people have been using to access the Croeso 2012 website, http://www.croesomultiday.org.uk.

According to Google Analytics, only 5% of recent visits to the site came through mobile use, and half of this fraction used screen resolutions of 768x1024 or larger (e.g. iPads). The website isn't designed with mobile users in mind but, despite this, they spend almost exactly the same time on the site as do those using laptops/desktops and the fraction of those who return is about the same too.

So, how much does it matter that the site isn't optimised for the 2.5% of users who have small screens?

[Paul Frost]

So, how much does it matter that the site isn't optimised for the 2.5% of users who have small screens?

Because the number is growing very fast. But it's not only screen size, touch screens don't have mice, so rollover and hover effects will not work (used on a lot of navigation bars).

By 2015 40% of the World's population will have access to the Internet. But a surprising number of people will be mobile first or mobile only users.

Worldwide mobile data traffic is due to increase 26-fold to 75 exabytes annually. That's the equivalent of 75 times the amount of global Internet IP data in the year 2000.

Almost half of UK internet users are going online via mobile phone data connections.

22-25% of US and UK mobile Internet browsers never or infrequently use the desktop Internet.
Full article by Luke Wroblewski an internationally recognized digital product leader who has designed or contributed to software used by more than 700 million people worldwide. His Data Monday posts are full of such statistics.