Benefits of Topic-Specific News
Pinterest is established on a wonderfully simple concept: let people create pin boards for news and content relating to certain topics.
It really makes sense. It’s a great way to organize information, and works well for people who follow your news. Rather than following a news stream about the many interests a person has, one can follow a news stream about specific topics you are interested in.
YouTube offers this feature as well, letting people have different channels or lists. Twitter also offers a similar feature.
For most people, Facebook gives you just one place to post all your views and interests: your Facebook wall.
If you want to use Facebook more effectively, you’ll need to create topic-specific Pages.
Creating Topic-Specific Facebook Pages
To create a topic-specific Facebook page, click the triangle menu and choose Create Page as shown below.
When choosing to create a page, you’ll be taken to Facebook.com/pages/create/ as shown below.
You’ll need to choose the kind of page you’re creating. Pages are slightly customized based on their use. For example, for local businesses your location is more relevant. For a topic-specific Facebook page, Cause or Community is a good choice. Follow the steps that will guide you through the setup process.
Working With Facebook Pages
The method for working with Facebook Pages has changed recently. In the past, under the triangle menu, there was an option to Use Facebook As and choose from one of your pages. If you chose the option to See More, you would be presented with a list of your pages with an option to Login to any of those pages so you could use Facebook as a page. Once you were logged into a page, you could see that page’s news feed.
Now the heading under the triangle menu is Your Pages with a few of the pages listed. You simply go to any of your pages, and once there, you can post as yourself, or post as that page or any of your other pages. This is a good way to create interconnectedness among your pages when the topic of a post overlaps. Below you can see an example of this.
As you can see above, on the Small House Society page, the default setting is to post as that page, but I can post as myself or another page.
Creating an Inbound News Stream
When setting up a Facebook page, the most important step is often overlooked by people. It’s important to like other related pages. When you do, you’re letting those pages know about your new page. You’re also laying the basis for an inbound news stream.
Visit a page that’s related to your page and click on the triple dot ‘more’ menu as shown below.
When you do this, your page is registered as liking that page, and this shows up on your page list of likes as well.
Viewing Your Inbound News Stream
Now that you’ve liked many related pages, you can view your inbound news stream. See the option on your page as shown below in the bottom of the left column that says “View Pages Feed – See posts from other Pages.”
When you click the option to View Pages Feed, you’ll now have your own personal topic-specific news feed. That’s the first benefit. High quality news from sources you choose.
The second benefit is that you now have a stream of news, relevant to your page visitors, that you can easily re-post to your page.
In this way your page can be a hybrid of information from other sources as well as a way to promote the articles you write on your website, blog, or elsewhere.
If you link the Facebook page to a Twitter account that’s similarly topic-specific, you can automatically have Tweets created for you from everything that you post to the Facebook page.