Facebook Community Pages and Church Social Media Strategy, part 1

In April, Facebook quietly introduced “Community Pages“, a new feature that creates common pages for interests, activities, and entities. According to the Facebook blog:

Community Pages are a new type of Facebook Page dedicated to a topic or experience that is owned collectively by the community connected to it. Just like official Pages for businesses, organizations and public figures, Community Pages let you connect with others who share similar interests and experiences.

Amid the outcries against Facebook’s aggressive push to allow public access to all profile data (including personal private information), the introduction of Community Pages has not received much attention. However, this move by Facebook has significant implications for churches and their social media strategy.

Facebook’s Community Page strategy is aimed at creating more content and pages against which Facebook can serve advertisements. How Facebook does this is by automatically aggregating content on new Community Pages by scraping users status updates and importing content from existing Wikipedia pages and the result is a centralized page around a specific topic. As you can see for the new Unconventional Method Community Page (pictured above), statuses that contain the phrase “unconventional method” are being automatically displayed regardless of their relevance.

Community for bots

However, despite Facebook’s claim that these topical pages are “owned collectively by the community connected to it“, there is currently no way (as far as I can tell) for anyone outside of Facebook to influence or control what content is displayed on the page. In fact, individual Facebook users are often unaware that their private status updates are publicly visible on these Community Pages. A (hilarious) example of this is the “My Stupid Boss” Community Page which displays status updates that contain the words “my”, “stupid”, and “boss” in them. Now your private Facebook rants may be visible to everyone without your knowledge or consent.

What does this mean for churches?

What little control you have on Facebook is being further eroded.

Facebook has shown consistent disregard for privacy and control over information and is aggressively pushing forward with feature updates with the end goal of being the information currency system of the entire web. Will Facebook succeed and become the central hub for all personal activity online? Probably not, but it’s clear that because of Facebook’s popularity and its “it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission” approach Facebook will access and use information about you and your church for it’s own purposes, without your permission, and with little recourse available for what they do.

You have no control over your church’s Community Page

It appears that every aspect of the creation and updating of a Community Page is entirely automated by Facebook. Currently, neither your church nor your community of supporters has any ability to influence the page directly.

The way Facebook is creating these Community Pages can only be described as “sneaky“. Instead of having users initiate page creation, Facebook introduced a process by which users can inadvertently and unknowingly initiate a page’s creation.  Recently, logged-in users have been redirected to a page which asks them which pages they would like to link to their profile. The choices appear to be generated from the user’s profile information (e.g. employment and education) and are all selected when the page appears.

Facebook does state that linking to certain pages “may also create additional Pages“, but it is not immediately obvious what this means. I believe Facebook is hoping users will not pay much attention to what’s happening, resulting in the creation of more Community Pages. Since this confirmation page loads automatically, disrupting the user’s activities on the site, it is very likely that users will simply click “Save Changes” to return to what they were previously doing. Additionally, the options that are presented correspond with existing information that the user has provided, so a natural assumption is that linking will just confirm what is already in place.

Once created, Facebook is posting a message to visitors of each page which imply that some level of influence will given to Facebook users in the future. The message asks you to indicate your interest by signing up but no indication is given of when users will be invited to contribute nor the level of influence they will have.

Platform changes are frequent and unpredictable

Moves like this one and Facebook’s recent half-step that restricted the ability to set up custom landing tabs, show that Facebook’s drive for profitability has the company barreling forward with platform changes with little to no regard for organizations that rely on the social network. We can expect this to be the norm moving forward. The challenge becomes that just when you think you’ve got Facebook figured out and are starting to achieve real ministry impact and ROI, Facebook is likely to change the rules on you. Churches will need to be agile if they expect to keep up.

Should churches abandon Facebook?

I’ve argued in the past that Facebook is important because it is where people are. Does the fact that Facebook keeps changing the rules of the game mean that churches should abandon the platform entirely?

No. But churches need to have realistic expectations of how Facebook will work with them. Churches should not expect for Facebook to be aligned with their interests. Despite being the world’s largest “social” network, Facebook is and always be a business. We should not expect Facebook’s profit motive to ever be subordinate to our churches’ people-motives.

For that reason, a church should also never find ourselves in a position where it is completely reliant on Facebook for it’s social media strategy. Churches and ministries that are seeking to change lives and serve the common good must always be thinking “beyond web”. Because of it’s popularity and prevalence in our society, it is easy for churches to make Facebook the only platform for their web strategy. This is a short-sighted strategy and will ultimately leave churches at the mercy of Facebook’s business plan. An effective church social media strategy engages through diverse social media platforms.

How to best use Facebook

Understanding the true nature of the organization is Facebook will tp define the real opportunities for churches and will shape church social media strategies. In Part 2 I will dig into the implications of these changes for churches and point out some strategies for making sure taking advantage of new opportunities that are being created.