Freecycle and Facebook
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Freecycle and Facebook
Creating a Facebook page for your Freecycle group is a great way to promote your local group. This is a guide for local moderator teams of The Freecycle Network® only.
Setting up your group's Facebook page
Here's how to get started:
- Log into Facebook from a personal Facebook account. It is possible to preserve your privacy if you use your own personal Facebook account, although you do have to be vigilant.
- From the top of the Facebook page, pull down the triangle on the far right side.
- Click "Create Page." Make sure you create a page rather than a group. A page has much stricter editorial controls than a group does.
- Category: Companies and organizations: Non-Profit Organization
- Name: Give it a name that closely matches your official Freecycle group. For copyright purposes, if you're in the U.S. it's a good idea to use XXXXX Freecycle.org. In the U.K. Freecycle is better.
- Make sure you get the correct copyright information on your page. The Impressum is a good field for the copyright statement.
- Email: Leave this blank unless you have a non-Freecycle address you want to put in. Please don't publish a Freecycle.org email address. Instead set up the "Contact Us" button to link to the website.
- Use the official Freecycle logo somewhere on your page. Here is a handy square JPG you can use for your profile photo:
Recommended settings
- General: Visitor posts. If you want to give visitors the ability to publish posts, it's a good idea to check the box next to "Review posts by other people before they are published to the Page." Otherwise your page will fill up with Offers and Wanteds that belong on MyFreecycle.
- Post attribution -- Gives you the option of making posts under the name of your group
Managing your identity
To the right of the search box at the top of your group's Facebook page, you will see either your name or your group's name. This is the identity governing your current Facebook activities. If you see your name, you probably will want to change the settings. From the top of the Facebook page, pull down the triangle on the far right side and change your name to the name of your group.
As long as you see your group's name at the top of the page, any action you perform such as publishing posts and "liking" other pages will happen under your group.
Ideas for posts
- Links to local charity donation events, book drives, etc.
- Examples of creative recycling, especially in your community
- What do I do with...
- Interesting items from your group's posts
- Information about donating items to local charity groups
- Items of seasonal interest
- News stories of interest to the Reduce/Reuse/Recycle community
How to spread the word
- Ask your Facebook friends to "like" your page
- Put an Admin on your group announcing your new Facebook page
- Put a "Like us on Facebook" signature on your moderator email address
- "Like" your local nonprofit/charity groups and hope they return the favor
- Share your group's posts with your personal Facebook friends
Associate your Facebook page with The Freecycle Network
Once you get your page set up, here's how to associate your local groups' Page with the official Page for The Freecycle Network. This helps visitors confirm that you are officially part of The Freecycle Network. Note: these settings aren't very "sticky," so keep these instructions handy. You will have to keep doing this periodically.
- Visit http://www.facebook.com/bookmarks/pages
- Select your local groups' Page by clicking on the name
- Click Edit page and then Update Info
- In the "Basic Information" section, locate the "Official Page" box and type "The Freecycle Network" (without the quotation marks)
- You'll see our Page will be shown as the search result (complete with our official logo)
- Type "The Freecycle Network" to locate our official Page
- Select this result and scroll to the bottom of the page and click "Save Changes"
- Your Page will now look similar to this
A "Community Page about The Freecycle Network"
Got a great post to share? Send it to ____________ .
For more information
If there are any follow up questions relating to this, or anything else, please contact your Social Media team at socialmedia@freecycle.org
