Friday, January 25, 2013

Setting up Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter organisation/company pages/accounts

The case study for this subject that I have been working on in the past several days has motivated me to attempt to set up organisational  Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages/accounts . In my previous subject of ‘Fundamentals of Web Publishing’, I thought linking the webpage of the organisation that I had created (http://csusap.csu.edu.au/~esarmi01/webinf446/) to social media would be a good idea. Way back then, I did not have any exposure at all to any of the Big 3 of social media. I believe now is the time to continue this unfinished work.

Facebook
In the past, a lot of organisations are creating Facebook profiles as if the organisation itself were a person with a firstname, lastname, date of birth, etc.; however Facebook has a link (http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php) for creating Facebook pages for organisations (Nelson & Herndon, 2012). Having an organisational Facebook page offers more features than a group (Nelson & Herndon, 2012). Organisational Facebook page (or Fan Page timeline) can be used to build relationships with members. Although it has a profile image, a cover photo, and a timeline, a Facebook page for organisations and businesses has a different administrative panel from that of an individual account.

Setting up an organisation/company Facebook page is quite a straightforward process. Also, Facebook has a link on how to setup (https://www.facebook.com/business/build) a business page. After the initial setup, most of the settings are made in the Admin Panel where an administrator can update information, manage permissions, notifications, and resources, build an audience, and other administrative configurations. Well, this is what I ended up with:

LinkedIn
Similar to Facebook, LinkedIn has a different link for company page creation (http://www.linkedin.com/companies). Even though LinkedIn uses the term “company,” it’s a feature that can be used by organizations of all types, as well as organizations of any size (Hunt, 2011). A learning page (http://learn.linkedin.com/company-pages/) exists for people who want to learn company page setup. Also, Hunt (2011) suggested doing the setup process into three phases: Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced.

According to LinkedIn (2013), you can add a new company page only if you meet all of the following requirements:

1)  You're a current company employee and your position is listed in the Experience section on your profile.
2) You have a company email address (e.g. john@companyname.com) added and confirmed on your LinkedIn account.
3) Your company's email domain is unique to the company.
Note: A domain cannot be used more than once to create a company page. Because domains like gmail.com or yahoo.com or similar generic email services are not unique to one company, those domains cannot be used to create a company page. You might consider creating a group if your company doesn't have a unique email domain.
4) Your profile strength must be listed as Intermediate or All Star.
5) You must have several connections.

Unfortunately because I was not able to meet the requirements (specifically requirement 3) of adding a company page, I was not able to create my LinkedIn organisational page.

Twitter
Setting up an organisation Twitter account is similar to setting up an ordinary individual account. Twitter does not differentiate between personal and business account and it is simple to setup. Here is my organisation's Twitter account: https://twitter.com/ElmarBSolutions

Although the setup processes of Facebook and Twitter are quite straightforward, the problems I encountered with LinkedIn company page creation reflect the strict requirements of this social media. I enrolled INF506 expecting to go beyond the basics of the more popular social networking sites. Although it is not a requirement of the course, setting up the above organisational accounts has given me an outlook of social media's applications in organisations. Indeed, linking the right social media with the main organisational website is a good outreach strategy.


References

Hunt, C. S. (2011, December 6). LinkedIn “company” pages: an (undervalued) gem for organizations of all types. Social Media In Organisations. Retrieved January 14, 2013, from http://www.sminorgs.net/2011/12/linkedin-company-pages-an-undervalued-gem-for-organizations-of-all-types.html

LinkedIn. (2013, January 17). Requirements for adding company pages. Retrieved from http://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1594

Nelson, M., & Herndon, D. (2012). Facebook all-in-one for dummies. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. 

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