This is of course by far not an exhaustive list of ideas, but I thought, if you’re struggling with keeping a Facebook group for a higher education entity (school, faculty, whatever) going, you might as well try some of these:
Orientation days/weeks
One week before the beginning of each semester, we have our new international students arrive. They get a nice welcome on our campus, tours, and lots of fun activities. At some point, we grab them and talk to them a little about our web site, and that’s the point where we introduce our Facebook group. The response is usually quite mixed: students from non-English speaking countries often haven’t heard about it because their home countries use different applications for the same purpose. Others seem surprised that university students would waste their time on such a space. We find the inclusion of international students into our Facebook group a very important facet - often, these students struggle to get in touch with the local crowd, or they don’t hear of events early enough. By being part of this group, they can contact people they have met over the Orientation week and organise activities (which really works), and they can also read our posted events. On the less noble side, I am the first one to admit that it is a fantastic opportunity for our marketing efforts as well: imagine - all these people from different countries bring their Facebook contacts with them! Thus, people from Canada, the US, Germany, the UK and many more can read about what’s going on over there in Down Under, and hopefully think “Wow, this sounds like fun, I want to go there, too!” (and spend those precious imported dollars, hehe).
The merchandise
Very early in the process we had the idea of creating business card-like handouts to ask people to join us. We can now not only hand them out to students who have already joined our Faculty, but also at our Information Days to potential students! Again, imagine - a 17-year-old girl (our main target audience and standard persona for our strategies) comes up to our stall and thinks “Hm, I’m not so sure, I am kind of insecure about the whole uni thing: what will it be like? Will I get along with my fellow students? And isn’t uni really boring anyway?” and then somebody gives you a funky little card to invite you to a group of your favourite social space on the internet. Come on, you have to admit, that’s a pretty smart idea 
Not only will they give us credit that we are using such a trendy space to build our community, they also have the most authentic display of how our students interact with each other and can fit right in!
Events advertising
A quick example: we tried to organize a standard alumni event recently, and applications were really low, around 20 or so. We sent off a quick email to one of our “cyber-SPROUTS” (read previous post on what that means) to put up an event and send out invitations (to increase authenticity, we usually make students do that for us). That was only 2 days before the event. And on the night over 70 people showed! This shows the direct impact this type of advertising can have. And it works twice as much for you: you get people to come to your event, but you also get members of your Facebook group to check the space regularly because there is a real incentive there.
Spin-offs
Once your main group has reached a critical mass of people, you can decide to create spin-offs if this hasn’t already been done by the students themselves. We have advertised Facebook amongst our academics for quite some time now, and some of them have joined and are beginning to discover this space for themselves. I have just been approached recently by one of our younger Doctors, and she now runs a pretty active spin-off concentrating on her program area within the Faculty.
Do you have any other ideas of how to keep the swing going in your Facebook group? Please let me know, I will be very interested to hear about it!
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