By Ken Matsueda

Facebook is really difficult. To be more exact, I didn’t realise that managing Facebook page is that difficult and energy-consuming until the moment I launched and started to update IOM Nepal’s new Facebook page.

As one of the 1.11 billion ordinary Facebook users, I used to think that liking someone’s day-to-day updates is not really such a big deal for me, whilst I recognised the importance for advertisement and social marketing. But, as a site manager, now that I’m literally struggling with daily updates that can draw people’s attention and make them hit ‘like’ and ‘share’ buttons!

It’s been a while since Facebook and twitter first made evolutional changes in the field of media communication and massive impacts on one’s everyday life. Numerous websites provide useful tips about how to come up with more attractive posts for social media and increase the number of likes. However, no matter how I applied those tips, it seems it all depends!

One of the most difficult challenges that I’m now facing is to localise IOM’s values and messages disseminated globally, and reversely to contextualise local news in the global and/or regional trends, like connecting dots to draw a big picture. In addition, I think that would be so great if I can nicely embed somehow difficult and sensitive topics into easier and more familiar ones, associating with viewers’ interests.  But… how could I do this?

A friend of mine told me that she likes to see ‘infographics’ on Facebook. So, I used an infographic about migration trends in South Asia like many other pages do. This stab, in fact, helped to increase our fans quite substantially. Another friend also advised me that asking questions about people’s thoughts on a topic posted is important, and at the same time, effective to increase their engagement on social media. I thus, wrote a little blurb referring to Lady GaGa  which asks a question about one’s view. I’m still not sure, to be honest, how well this tactic worked, but one thing that I can tell you is that the blurb has been seen by more people than others. Perhaps it was mention of the Lady?

The main thing for managing social media is that key messages are shared by a lot of fans, and ultimately they encourage their friends to take part in both online and offline chatty discussions. In this sense, yet another post on a disaster risk reduction in Nepal amazingly drew people’s attention and encouraged them to share the story with others more than anything else. And I’ve been thinking about what made them do it, but… I’m still confused! So have you any thoughts?

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Ken Matsueda is a Communication Officer in IOM Nepal