This presentation is related to some of the content I covered at the Downstate Regional  Conference for the Illinois Council on Continuing Higher Education (ICCHE) at the University of Illinois at Springfield, April 16, 2010. It provides a basic outline of the various functions of Facebook (user profiles, fan pages, and groups). It also provides some links to helpful resources on Facebook (i.e., the Facebook Blog and the Help Center) and shows the places in Facebook in which a user can set his/her privacy settings. There are, of course, other social media tools that organizations can utilize to reach an audience, but it’s hard to refute Facebook’s reach at this point in time.

A worthwhile current read about Facebook and social networks, in my opinion, is Clara Shih’s The Facebook Era: Tapping Online Social Networks to Build Better Products, Reach New Audiences, and Sell More Stuff (Prentice Hall: Pearson Education, 2009).