Social networking has been much on our company’s mind lately, so much so that I’m part of a corporate committee that meets regularly to talk about issues relating to Facebook, Twitter and other social media matters.
One of the issues that’s come up of late is how to use Facebook to the utmost benefit. If you “like” the Chronicle on Facebook (and if you don’t why not toss us some love), then you know we post links to our stories there several times each day. We also post photos, videos, bulletins and other newsy material as needed.
So far, the material we’ve put onto Facebook has been just that: newsy. The question before our committee is whether we should allow other types of content onto our wall.
Of course, I’m talking about advertising in one for or another.
The discussion is not about whether to put pure ads into the Facebook stream. That idea doesn’t have a lot of traction. No, the notion here is whether to advertise some of the newspaper’s promotions in the Facebook feed.
For example, say the newspaper started offering a groupon-like promotion. One member of the committee suggested that this is just the sort of thing that our fans likers on Facebook would want to know about; hence, we should put it in the feed.
It’s not an ad for someone else. It’s an ad for a service or promotion the paper is offering. That’s the point of discussion between members of the committee, some of whom feel that any self-promotion will violate the pure news stream and push our likers away (and cost us their trust to boot).
So I put the question to you, readers. What do you think the Chronicle should do? Should we allow promotional messages into our Facebook feed, or should we keep it all news and notes?