[tbworld]

Hi Gary,

My daughter uses Facebook to bring her users to her small board, otherwise she would be in the same boat. She has only 800 users, a third are very active -- her school and her friends. Without the Facebook tie-in she would have almost none. It is much easier for her to add large content on her board so she likes that, yet it is clear that the young age group prefers the ease of Facebook with it's mobile features. Unfortunately, all of it looses out to plain ol' text messaging. I wrote an app to send SMS messages to and from her board, but it really has not caught on. As Facebook grows and features grow it might be a hard sell, but my daughter still has more fun with her board.

The large board I oversee is a corporate board, which the users are forced to use. We recently (over the last year) have added a social aspect to it where the users can now interact with social media as kind of an experiment to bring brand awareness of the company. Outside users cannot sign-up, but inside users can post external Facebook events to the company system and vice-versa. I am kind of curious what I will learn from this interaction. For some reason the employees think we are more progressive by having this kind of tie-in and it brings a little company pride -- don't ask me why.

In the business world mobile is everything, our employees use their mobile phone two to one over their desktops for posting messages. This is where I have concentrated our concern in our IT department. Internal employee interaction and communication is vital to the company.

It is clear that Facebook is a major player and you cannot ignore it when designing a site like yours. On the other-hand it does not do everything well, and to me not nearly as fun to play around with. In my opinion merge your site with social media, have great content on your board and the really active users will slowly come. I think Facebook is a great tool to feed your site, but it might take a while.