Quick start: 3 ways of building communities on Facebook

In this quick guide we”ll look at three useful ways of building communities on Facebook.

Sometimes people worry about using Facebook to talk to people who aren’t personal friends and family. All of these methods allow you to interact with people without needing to be Facebook-friends with them.

Pages allow you to use Facebook under the name of a website, business or place. Horsham and Kings Cross are two examples of popular Facebook pages started by Visit Horsham and Kings Cross Environment respectively.

Notice that in both cases, Facebook has added check-ins to the community pages. People who use location features in Facebook can check-in to a place, they can ‘like’ the page or comment on its wall.

The Horsham administrator Gavin encourages comments and interaction on the page by reposting questions he receives through email or on the main website.

Create a Page on Facebook here.

An example of a collaborative document from the Show and TAL group

Groups are good for encouraging discussions and debate. They can be private or public. For example, our Show and TAL group is used to share tips and links to hyperlocal websites.

An added feature of groups is collaborative documents, where groups can all add and edit text together (as seen, right).

Find help on creating a Group in Facebook here .

Finally, Events are a good way to build community involvement.

As we showed in this post, they don’t have to just promote events in real-life physical spaces but can also be used to build up an audience for a regular digital event.

Facebook’s guide to creating an event is here.

All three of these methods need more than just starting them to be successful communities. You’ll need to plug away, ask your friends to invite their friends and share content frequently to see them grow and become more interactive. But with so many people spending more time on Facebook than any other website, reaching out to them here is very worthwhile.