How the ONU Student Planning Committee Benefits From Facebook

I have always used Facebook socially, not for an organization. I have always known that some people use it for their brand but I have never put too much thought into why or how.

Part 3 of Share This has broken down how and why organizations should use Facebook for their brand. It provides a list of five benefits to doing this:

1. Build communities
2. Engage with fans
3. Amplify your message
4. Socially enable your business
5. Sell your products and services

For this blog, I will share how an organization that I am in benefited in all of these ways. The organization that I am in is called the Student Planning Committee. This committee plans many of the events on Ohio Northern University's campus.

I have not personally been in charge of the organization's Facebook page but after reading this list, I would have to agree that Facebook has benefited our organization in all five of these ways.

The Facebook page has built a community for the Student Planning Committee. The community that it has built is full of students who enjoy attending our events. Once they like our page, they are automatically updated with dates and times of events that we have planned. Sometimes there are even contests on the site.

Our engagement with fans is slightly lacking. We engage with them by posting when our events are but because there are not many fans who post or comment on our feed, we cannot interact with them as much as we would like to. When we have event pages, we do respond back to comments that people leave on those.

The Facebook page has vastly amplified the messages that we like to provide to our audience. We have higher attendance and most of that is due to the advertising that our Facebook enables us to do.

This page also socially enables the organization because it allows our fans to share our posts which creates an even wider range of fans that we are reaching.

If it were not for this Facebook page, we would have as much advertisement as we do. This advertisement helps us sell our services by letting everyone know when they can use them by coming to our events.

Along with the social media benefits, there are also pitfalls. When someone is unhappy with one of our events, our Facebook page makes it easier for them to let more people know about their bad experience. This can take some fans away from our organization.

We take great pride in our organization and hope that everyone is happy with our events. If they are not, we would rather them address one of us rather than the internet.