Did anything come about in regards to this discussion that took place.
Ive recently started to get involved in beekeeping and think it would be great for a FB page for the association.
As someone who uses FB every day for other activities i would be interested in being involved in getting something going on FB.
So what was the outcome of all the chat?
Dave
My two pence worth.
I will be honest and say I am not a FB fan. I had a page for my business and it achieved nothing so deleted it. I f ind FB very difficult to use and so being a KISS person do not use it. Simples.
Before anyone gets all carried away about the current fad... anyone remember 2nd life? Look what happened there. Paltalk was all the rage for a while to. UK groups on there now, number zero. And so it goes, these things come and go.
A website costs £6 to buy the domain, and I can point you to a person who for £100 will create your site for you. He just did one for my business. And did the beesite one for me too.
By all means go the Facebook route but dinna be at all surprised if it dies on you.
PH
Facebook is ridiculously simple to use and can be as active or inactive as you want. Saying that it's a passing fad is slightly luddite PH - sorry mate. If it didn't work for you that's a shame. I can point to a dozen businesses including my own where it's an essential communication tool. Maybe it's a generational thing but then I'm not exactly a teenager at 43.
What I would say and this is more for Alasdair Joyce - if you have a Facebook page for the SBA you'll need a widget/plugin to be able to incorporate it into the SBA website. That way they feed off each other. Not much point otherwise.
Last edited by drumgerry; 25-10-2012 at 08:52 PM. Reason: clarification
I couldn't let this bit goOriginally Posted by Poly Hive
. Much as I'd quite like to, I think dismissing Facebook as a fad 8 years down the line is a little optimistic. Comparisons to second life, which was triumph of marketing to technical journalists and a game, but at its peak never had more than about 100,00 users is comparing apples to oranges. Might Facebook go the same way as MySpace? I don't see why not, but currently it's many people's main interaction with "the Internet", as an example a year or so ago a website with an article about Facebook ended up being the number one google result for "Facebook" their comments section for the article was deluged with complaints from people who just wanted to login and chat to their friends.
But I digress. For an organisation it's a valid tool to get out there but it needs effort to make it work, the BBKA is a classic example of how not to manage a Facebook page.
Last edited by Neils; 26-10-2012 at 12:19 AM.
A lot of organisations have facebook pages, some use it as a place for conversation because they don't have any other online presence.
Emails don't always arrive, so I find it useful to check dates of meetings and so on, for a couple of organisations I belong to. I don't see why SBA couldn't use FB for announcements, I'm not sure if there's a need for anything else because this forum is more than adequate. But it would need somebody to maintain it, which could be asking quite a lot. The bonus is that it's free, and if it doesn't work out it's easy enough to delete an account.
This is what Facebook was like last year. Mostly US-based stats, unfortunately, but there were more than 200,000,000 UK users http://www.kenburbary.com/2011/03/fa...-statistics-2/ They can't all be wrong
My personal concern is that we end up with effectively two SBA online communities, on here and one on Facebook. Double the amount of effort to maintain.
Don't get me wrong, I get the appeal of it and it is simple and easy to set it up (in isolation).
I think that perhaps more integration with Facebook of this forum is not a bad thing but I think that perhaps for a lot of us, Facebook isn't "the Internet". I check in on it maybe once or twice a month but I'm actually very wary of linking the rest of my online presence into Facebook, I like having a degree of separation that Facebook effectively removes.
I have done a bit of head scratching to try and figure out how to make it work and I do still feel that allowing closer integration of this forum with some of the Facebook friendly features is perhaps preferable to diving head first into Facebook itself.
These are just my personal opinions.
I think it's safe to say I'm at odds with you Nellie and PH - but that's ok. I'm pretty sure we'll all live through having different opinions!
So here's an example where Facebook would be handy for the SBA. They want to announce something to their members. They don't necessarily have to wait till the magazine comes out to do it. And for some reason the news feature on the SBA website is hugely underused. Two minutes on a status update on Facebook and job's a good un. I wouldn't have to ask on here what exams are being offered in March if they did that from time to time. And I don't necessarily see a Facebook page as being hand in glove with SBAi and hence maybe competing with it. It would be a good complement to the main SBA site. Bloody hell I'd set it up and maintain it myself if someone asked me! If Alasdair could stick a Facebook like box on the SBA website then the Facebook page and the website would be tied together and mutually beneficial.
Again just my 43 year old opinion.
Don't disagree with you to a point. I have no involvement with the SBA web presence outside of this forum but I agree with you about the news page and I don't see Facebook changing that to any meaningful degree. Whether the website, this forum or Facebook it's not a zero effort package.
I think that allowing Facebook sign in to here and 'like' buttons are fine but just assuming that having a Facebook page makes all the perceived weaknesses of what we currently have go away rather than just adding another layer of maintenance is, I feel, a little optimistic.
I also don't see Facebook as being a good medium, or a better one, for dissemination of some of the information that you mention compared to a standard web presence. It can be complimentary to that but it is, at the end of the day, a chat page. The groups facility is ok but it lacks the flexibility and functionality that a standard web site can provide.
I'm not trying to disagree for the sake of it and you raise some very valid points but I think regarding Facebook as an easy panacea is simplistic.
Again Nellie not disagreeing just for the sake of it but I think you may have misinterpreted what I'm saying here. I don't see Facebook as a panacea. I think what I said was it would complement what the SBA does at the moment. I don't see it as a better medium for things just another one. Not sure why there's such opposition to it to be honest. Why on earth wouldn't the SBA want to make announcements using Facebook? If it allowed them to reach a few hundred or a thousand more people? With someone running it who was fed the information and actually carried out the status updates it would work fine.
The connect button doesn't seem to do anything. Not sure if that's because I'm on a phone or I need to enter my Facebook details onto the forum login bits. If its the latter do we have the option to move the layout to make it more obvious?
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