As more students begin to use Facebook as the primary forum for their social life, leaders of the Jewish community are working to adapt their methods to make use of this new and powerful tool.
The most prominent example of the shift in methods is in the use of Facebook groups, events, and fliers to replace paper fliers around campus. Groups and events have the added power of an invite feature, allowing students to be targeted in a way which is most time effective.
“People, in my experience, are more likely to attend an event if they are personally invited,” said Alex Freedman, JSU president, adding “the group and event invitation serves that function on a grand scale — it allows the word to be spread better among a target audience quicker than any other medium.”
Some of the most successful events on campus recently have been publicized solely using Facebook invitations. For example, the recent Shabbat seudah shlishit and Mincha/Marriv co-sponsored by the Conservative and Mechitzah minyans drew over 30 students using this technique.
Further, because of the capacity of Facebook groups to be both localized to a college campus or global, incorporating all of Facebook, they are extremely flexible and allow for the potential of spreading targeted advertising beyond a single campus.
“It’s one of the best ways that college students can have a real voice across our own campus and campuses around the country,” said Sarah Yael Morris, one of the coordinators of the Idan Raichel concert on campus, who revealed that “we just reached 101 members [in] our Idan group, and I’m expecting it to continue to grow.”
Despite recent controversy over the addition of “News Feeds,” technology which allows a user’s friends to see updates to his or her profile, status, and group/event membership, many believe that this is one of the most powerful tools which Facebook offers.
“All of a sudden, people no longer had to be individually invited to a group or to an event, they could see what their friends were doing,” explained Andy Ratto, Hillel’s JCSC fellow, adding “this has been extremely useful because people might be rather unlikely to go to an event where they didn’t know anyone who would be there, but all of a sudden people would find out about an event BECAUSE their freinds were going to it, and then they would want to come, too.”
The news feed technology is so powerful that as a group grows it can reach every member of the Facebook community.
According to a blog post by Christopher Cox, a Facebook engineer, when the group “For Every 1,000 people that join this group, I will donate $1 to Darfur” was started, it grew broadly enough to reach the news feed of every facebook user.
Although such reach requires a membership of approximately five-hundred thousand of Facebook’s over 12 million members, by targeting students a campus group could easily reach all the news feeds of a given campus.
Most importanly to student groups, however, Facebook groups provide an efficient use of resources: ten minutes spent targeting invitations to potentially students can yield many more attendees than an hour of flyering around campus. “[It] saves us a lot of phone calls, a lot of fliers, and a lot of time,” said Freedman, noting that “since it’s easier, these programs happen more frequently, which engages our Jewish community more than otherwise.”