Is it the 300 million-plus active users? (Remember six months ago when 200 million seemed astonishing?)
Is it the fact that people 35 years and older are the fastest growing group on Facebook?
Well, those statistics don’t hurt.
But the reason I think your arts organization should take Facebook more seriously is this emerging trend:
More and more, people are using social networks like Facebook to aggregate all the rest of their online interactions.
Instead of looking at the party photos from last weekend on Flickr, they’re sharing them on Facebook. That hilarious video might be hosted on YouTube, but people are watching it on Facebook, and then posting it to their profiles. Instead of holding a group email discussion, people are posting to each other’s Facebook walls. They’re messaging on Facebook instead of emailing. They’re creating events in Facebook instead of using Evite.
When people start to want to get all the stuff they care about in one place, you want to be there, too. And the interactions on Facebook seem inherently more personal to people.
I have a theory that just being in the Facebook space is a sort of social lubricant – people who normally wouldn’t comment on your blog or email you a link are more likely to interact with you on Facebook. It feels like less of a risk.
Need another reason?
Facebook Pages are now available in public search, and Google has already indexed hundreds of millions of them.
Depending on your Google ranking, it may be easier for people to find your Facebook page on Google than it is to find your site there.
At this point, your arts organization is probably already on Facebook. Isn’t it time to start taking it a little more seriously?
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