Sibling Day was April 10 and it was great fun to see on Facebook how brothers and sisters were sharing photos and memories. Sibling Day is one of those special days that kind of snuck up on me. Actually, I didn't even know there was one. I am sure my sister was waiting on a card. Maybe next year, Sis.

 

With summer just around the corner, newspapers will be covering lots of outdoor fun. Concerts, festivals, pool openings, etc. There will be lots of crowd shots. Remember a great way to create engagement on Facebook is to use their tag feature. The photo above from the Baltimore Orioles' official Facebook page is a great example of how to do that. Post a a crowd photo and ask readers to tag themselves if they attended the event.

Yesterday I shared one of the things the staff at the Wellsville Daily Reporter did that got great fan engagement on Facebook. Today I'll talk about something else they did that earned them over 100 new fans.

The staff at the Wellsville (NY) Daily Reporter are gaining Facebook fans by the hundreds (yes, I said "hundreds"). Here's how they did it, Part 1.

Why should readers "like" you on Facebook? I'm sure editors have many good reasons. 1) Quality content. 2) Opportunities to share content. 3) Voting on polls. 4) Great galleries and videos. Those things are likely all true, but how does a single reader know that you have any of those things?

Media companies are quickly learning that effective Facebook posting takes more than just throwing a link into a status update.

On Friday, I wrote about how some media companies are starting to use a fill-in-the-blank approach on Facebook. And others, for a while, have been using questions and polls, as another way of engaging folks on Facebook.

The New York Times uses quotations quite effectively on Facebook.

More and more media companies are getting clever with their Facebook posts, all in an effort to engage more of their "friends" to participate with their social media site.

One somewhat new technique includes asking social media users to fill in the blank to a sentence or question.

How do you know which stories will get the best response on Facebook? The last thing you want to do is start posting 10 or 20 stories a day, deeming them all Facebook-musts. Instead, pick four or five good stories and spread those posts out throughout the day.

No one under the age of 13 is supposed to be on Facebook. Yet, according to a recent study, there are 7.5 million users on Facebook under the age of 13. Why?

When you post something on Facebook, are you using the appropriate tagging? Tagging is helpful because the person or group you tag in your photo, status update or post will be seen by that person's or group's friends or fans.

The Daily Register in Harrisburg, Ill., is featured in the 2011 APME Great Ideas book in the Multimedia Storytelling category for keeping its readers up-to-date on local flooding through social media.

We want all GateHouse newspapers to have Facebook accounts, and all of those accounts should be "pages," not "profiles." What should you do if you've been on Facebook for a while as a profile, have tons of "friends," but want to make the transition to a page? Here's how.

We often use social media to reach out to readers to promote our stories, but here's an example of using Facebook to promote your online calendar for a fun event.

Are some of Facebook's new features going too far in the name of user privacy?

A recent survey found that about a quarter of selective colleges use Facebook as part of their admissions evaluations. Do your readers think they should?

I've been asked at least a half dozen times over the last few weeks if it's a good idea for reporters to have Facebook pages.

This week, I stumbled upon Journal Star columnist Phil Luciano's professional Facebook page, while writing a post about a raw video he produced.

Based on the questions from the field on this topic and seeing Phil's Facebook page (which is well done), I thought I would take some time today to address when a reporter should have a Facebook page.

On Tuesday, I was leading a webinar for a group of about 20 GateHouse Media publishers and editors in upstate New York on social media usage when things got shaky. Well, sort of.

The meeting was one of many that corporate staff are leading across the country right now in an effort to detail our content strategy plans for 2012 initiatives like video, community blogging and social media.

On the social media front, we're spiking our expectations on Facebook usage for all of our newspapers and just after lunchtime on Tuesday (Eastern Standard Time), I was talking about best practices when it comes to actually posting content on Facebook for big news. I mentioned that using questions to engage audiences seems to be the most effective way to get Facebook users involved with your content.