Publicising your community

Once you’ve set up your site and mailing list, you should start telling people about them. Facebook and Twitter are great for sharing updates and for alerting people to new web posts. Set up both accounts using your group’s email address. Paste a link to a story from your site to the Facebook page and people will see a preview of it (remember to include a photo in each post). You can also add photos to your tweets, but you have to add these manually. Twitter will shorten web links for you, but you need to keep the message itself under 140 characters. If you have a Facebook page as well as a WordPress site or Tumblr blog, you need to make sure everyone can get the latest information about your group from any of those sites. You can cut and paste stories from one account to another, but you’ll need to add the photos and links separately; it’s simpler to cross-post articles between your sites. At the bottom of a published post on, say, WordPress, there’s a Share This section. Click Twitter, Facebook or Press This (if you want to post the story to another WordPress blog you manage). Make sure you’re logged in to your group’s Twitter account (not your own). For Facebook, use the drop-down menu to choose ‘From a page you manage’ rather than ‘On your own Timeline’ as the new post’s destination.

The post will have a link to the original source, so by posting between sites you’ll let people know about the existence of your other online sites.