Facebook

Facebook is used in the communications world as a means to connect to one another professionally. It can be used to reach out to companies and corporations. It can be used to promote oneself or their business. It is an efficient connector of business globally. As an in-training public relations practitioner, the knowledge on how to use Facebook given the right context and criteria is extremely beneficial.

In choosing three different companies without a Facebook presence and in turn creating for them a Facebook presence, a general understanding on how much work actually goes into maintaining a company’s page was achieved. Unfortunately the execution of adding other people from the class and allowing them into the created pages didn’t flow so eloquently.

Early on in the project, due to an excess of activity in the form of friend requests and inviting classmates to our pages almost everybody’s Facebook was shut down by Facebook. This was a little bit (a LOT a bit) disheartening because at the point in which my Facebook shut down I had just finished making my pages, adding the class, and was ready to begin commenting on classmates pages, which of course was the next phase of the project. And so, even as I write this, I am still adding people, two or three at a time so as not to arouse Facebook’s suspicions, and I haven’t re-created my pages to their fullest effect as of yet. Luckily for me however, I have a back-up of every word I had on my first account saved onto my flash drive.

I suppose that Facebook’s retaliation of the class so quickly early on is sort of reassuring in the social aspect in that they are trying to reduce fake profiles, and keep a certain level of internet safety. This of course, leads to a backlash for people who are trying to create a new Facebook presence and get their name out there or trying to create a new page for a company. In comparison with the Twitter project which we ended up doing concurrently because of the technicalities, at this point from a business perspective Twitter is for sure the way to go, simply because it is much easier to create a profile there and NOT have it taken down for something as silly as adding 15 other people too quickly. That’s crap.

As we’re approaching the end of the semester, I’m starting to realize what works and what doesn’t. I’m beginning to get a grasp on what is going to help me in my career and what I want to use. Due to the technicalities, and the overall slow decline of Facebook use, I will not be using Facebook unless the job absolutely calls for it. Besides, I’m almost 99.9% sure that within the next three years there will be a brand new social media site that will take the place of Facebook, especially for practitioners. This new site will join the leagues of the more useful ones such as Twitter, and Instagram.