1.2 Facebook pages
Here is a list of some Facebook Pages that have been created by staff associated with the OU and its Student Association. You can find a similar list for your university if you have a Facebook account by using the search function and then filtering by ‘Page’.
Facebook Pages tend to be created by companies, celebrities, and those with strong brands. This will include universities and student led organisations like the NUS in the UK.
Only administrators of Pages can post new core content to the account, followers can ‘like’ and add comments to this content. There is no limit to how many people can like a Page, so they can become large groups with lots of followers. This is important because Facebook Pages are always public, if you comment on, or like a Page, all the information you share on that Page will be available to anyone on Facebook who looks at that Page.
These types of Pages tend to be followed by students who want to stay connected to their institution, their halls of residence, their student union, society or their faculty at university. The value of Pages is that when you are following a Page, it tends to be, at some level, an official presence of an organisation or person on Facebook.
Facebook Pages have been used successfully for induction events for students (Challen, 2019). They have also been found to be helpful in supporting interactions between students (Phillips et al., 2017) and between staff and students to support general study skills (van Beynen and Swenson, 2016).