Facebook (█)
Facebook is an essential social platform for disseminating links to stories.
Facebook eclipses Twitter in number of users and clickthrough rates to
news articles. It’s now also used as a publishing platform. For more
information on publishing directly to Facebook, see Instant
Articles. This feature is open to all publishers.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Unparalleled audience size with more than 1 billion users daily. | Tough for small pages to get visibility. Unless you pay to promote a post,on average only about 4% of your ‘fans’ are seeing your content. |
| Video autoplay | Facebook provides a range of metrics but you can’t cross reference Facebook user data with your own. |
| Instant articles have beautiful and user-friendly interface with loading time 10x faster than mobile web. |
Pro tip: If you post a video directly to Facebook, rather than as a link
to Youtube, it will begin to play automatically (but without sound) when
viewed on the timeline. This is a great option for videos that have
strong openings. You may want to add text overlay to draw viewers in.
Audience
More than 70 percent of U.S. internet users are on Facebook. The fastest
growing audience segment is 45-54 years old and 78 percent of all users (more than
half a billion) access Facebook solely on a mobile device.
If your audience is online, they're likely on Facebook.
Metrics
Facebook provides basic metrics on the number of likes, comments, views,
shares for your page and for individual posts, as well as demographic
information about your followers.
If you're paying for Facebook to promote your content you can also
segment your audience to see how much traffic is coming from ads vs.
organic search or other links (much like Google Analytics).
See Facebook's guide to Page Insights for more detailed description of its analytics.
Privacy
Under the Privacy subsection of Facebook's Settings, users can choose who can see their stuff, who can look them up, and who can contact them. While creating posts, there is an additional option that allows you to choose who the post should be visible to. For the default, it's advisable to be more conservative, i.e. restrict access to the smallest group possible. Then, at an individual post level, you can expand the audience depending on the nature of the post.
Security
Supports Two-Factor Authentication: Yes
Under Facebook's Settings ("Security and Login"), users can set up "extra security" that includes two-factor authentication (which includes text messages, security keys, code generator apps, recovery codes, and backup codes), as well as getting alerts about unrecognised login (attempts).
Case studies
Newsroom
News 12 Brooklyn is an example of a local news site with an active Facebook page. In
addition to cross-posting almost all of its content to Facebook, they also foster engagement with polls and contests (i.e. reader cover photo of the day)
Classroom
Observing a lack of engagement and communication in his Spanish class, a USF teacher, Alessandro Cesarano created & programmed a Facebook page in Spanish for class discussions and their homework. Alessandro did not "have to waste class time teaching them how to use a new program because many of them already use Facebook". Read more here.
Additional resources
Tutorial\/help: How do I create a Facebook page?