My friend Ed Sirianno recently drew my attention to a post at Inigral (maker of the Schools Facebook app) with ten tips for getting faculty involved in using Facebook on campus.

While it is focused on higher education, the ideas apply to getting any reluctant group of people involved in Facebook. For online community managers, this can be a daunting proposition. While it is relatively easy to evangelize to people who already have dipped their toes in the water, it is sometimes excruciating to try to make the case for engagement through social media to intelligent skeptics who listen politely and then go about their business, chuckling to themselves about how silly you are.

Indeed, in  one community content initiative I am involved with, we recently suggested to our constituents that it was critical for them to use Facebook to generate interest in the work. Some of the responses I got back made me wonder what year I was in. Typical (paraphrased) response: “I set up a profile last year when my nephew visited me from college, but it seemed silly then and still does. I don’t want to see photos of what he ate for lunch.”

A community manager who is in charge of a public institutions social media and Facebook page might justifiably throw up their hands. But the failure is with the evangelists, not with the skeptics. We may make a good case for using Facebook (for instance, higher education people take note that 90% of college students are on Facebook), we need to make it engaging in an ongoing, day-to-day way for all the groups we hope will connect with it.

Here are some of the key ideas from Inigral, along with some of my comments:

• Polls: With well-crafted questions that eschew hype, you can give people a reason to visit and interact with your page.
• Photos: Post and tag — sharing and tagging of photos remains one of the easiest ways to engage people in creating content together.
• Sports Info: One-stop shareable hub of school sports results and other info.
• Office Hours: Virtual office hours (like Stanford does — Stanford is the “rock star” of colleges on Facebook with more than 45,000 fans).
• Announcements: Key departmental and other announcements — since they allow interaction through comments, this can become an important interaction area for faculty, many of whom are deeply invested in the organizational politics of their institutions.
• Students: In my view the most important reason for faculty to want to interact with Facebook on a daily basis is that this is where students are. If a community manager were to be intentional about creating a space for interactions between faculty and students, the early adopter faculty would begin to use it and demonstrate value to their colleagues.

Replace the word “student” with “citizen,” “customer,” “constituent,” or “fan” and you can see how this can translate into many other public-facing institutions.

Thanks, Ed, for sharing! I urge you to read the full Inigral post.