Tips for building a community on Facebook

image credits: Business2Community

Here are some authentic and practical ideas that can assist you in using Facebook to engage your students.
Facebook is extremely popular and leads off the list of most used social networks. For teachers who are looking to add a social media aspect to their classroom or even a single lesson, Facebook is nowadays one of the top choices. Engaging your audience by offering them dynamic content can help you to create an engaged community both in and out of the classroom.

Be Short and Precise

When using social media, being precise brings success. Short messages tend to be more useful and will generate more response compared to the longer ones. This is because longer messages tend to lack focus and readers may not find them interesting. A concise message can grab your audience’s attention more easily.The quicker you are able to get your point across, the more likely it is that you will generate a useful reaction from your community.

Question, Question, Question

You can easily spark a discussion by asking your community about their opinions, experiences, and suggestions. You can ask about a particular assignment, suggestions for future work (ie, of the following three books, which would you like to work on next) if your curriculum allows that, or give some sort of incentive for interacting on your page.

Include Media

Whether a still image, video, or music, sharing multimedia content with your community via Facebook is a great way to encourage them to become more engaged. Whether you’re sharing a cool video news story about something cool happening in the math world or a popular foreign language song to your language students, showing your community that all the information they’re learning in school exists in the ‘real world’, too can be an interesting way to get them more interested.

Upload At Appropriate Times

Unless it is part of a class assignment, most teachers don’t want their students spending class time twiddling around on Facebook.  Scheduling or posting content during the ‘after school’ hours is a great way to ‘re-engage’ your community when they might not otherwise be.

By Haword Roze @ Edudemic (slightly abridged)