San Francisco — Facebook announced new features on its Web site on Wednesday that will allow colleges and other organizations to create a centralized public profile and publish a live stream of announcements for their followers.
The changes expand the tools available to college administrators to communicate with students, alumni, and others who have Facebook accounts. Previously, the central pages for a college or university on Facebook were essentially walled off from the rest of the site, making it difficult for administrators to know whether any announcements or content that they posted were being seen.
Campuses will soon be able to create their own central public profiles, where they can post announcements and multimedia to a live, public feed. Students and others who choose to subscribe to the feed will see those updates on their home pages and be able to comment on any items posted. Facebook executives said they hoped the changes would make the site less like an address book and more like Twitter, another social networking site that allows users to post minute-by-minute status updates.
Public profiles will be widely available starting next week. Stephanie Balmer, dean of admissions and financial aid at Dickinson College, said the changes would “open up a whole new angle” for colleges to communicate on Facebook. Establishing a central, official place for students to find information about a college will make it easier for students to engage than the current approach, which encourages highly specialized groups.
“You’ve got this composite, rather than a number of appendages, which I think a lot of us have right know when it comes to Facebook,” she said. “I think it’s pretty exciting that there’s this jump-off point.”
At Stanford University, which partnered with Facebook to try out the feature early, campus representatives said they expected that its new Facebook profile would reach more people and encourage more of a conversation with the campus community than the old one.
“What this does for us is it’s more and more a really powerful comunication platform for the university,” said Lisa Lapin, a spokeswoman. In addition to venues like YouTube, Twitter, and iTunes, she said, “this is yet one more tool to bring the communication to where much of our audience already is.” — Josh Keller
One Response to Facebook Gives College Officials Better Tools to Reach Alumni and Students
gunthertbavarian - October 20, 2010 at 3:54 am
This is a major failure area for FB. Those “walled” campus pages were what made it great. You didn’t have the mental sports wackos posting diatribe comments on every post, or petitioners for stupid causes spamming walls along with fake spambot accounts trying to sell acai berry diets.
It seems most page admins are overwhelmed or too lazy to clean up their pages, and it makes visiting them as a student or alumni, a hassle. I don’t feel like weeding through all the bogus scams and one liners.
What they should have done is keep those closed off pages and handed them over to the schools. FB staff I think were the ones running them, and they just got fed up so they shuttered them in favor of open pages run by officials from the school where anyone could join. They should have let us have both. One for the sports loudmouths and kindergärtners who feel they have to spam every post, and the locked off pages for the school members where it stays clean and professional and relevent to school activities.