At midnight on June 13, 2009 the great “Facebook Land Grab” went live. According to Mashable, they registered 200,000 usernames within 3 minutes, over 500,000 were registered in 15 minutes, and it culminated with 3,000,000 registered in 12 hours. This is an astounding high number of users laying claim for their “piece” of Facebook within the first 12 hours, but it only equated to roughly 2% of the 150 million users on Facebook.

A few years ago, MySpace was the undisputed “king” of the social networks. Through platform development, the inclusion of third party developers, and maintaining a clean interface there is no doubt that Facebook has taken the crown. So out of that 150 million users, how many of them live or work in your service area? More importantly, how many of them are with your agency as a responder? As the story of the EMT posting a murder scene photo on Facebook demonstrates, the chances are that it is more than you probably realize.

One of the huge differences between MySpace and Facebook has been its implementation of its Newsfeed. The Facebook Newsfeed uses push technology to update the user of their friends status and recommends groups or pages that the user might like based on their friends likes and dislikes. This method has caused more engagement from the users in what is a clean environment minus the flashy graphics and gaudy page designs that choked the MySpace.

The opportunity that Facebook presents is the ability to both strengthen brand recognition, strengthen relationships, strengthen the value an agency has to its community, and most importantly is to become informed about negative accusations or feedback so that it is addressed promptly. EMS Agencies should be using Facebook to connect better with both their responders and their potential patients.

The absolute worst thing an EMS Agency can do is to ignore the internet has evolved into the social web and that Facebook is playing a central role in that continual evolution. Just because you ignore it, doesn’t mean people aren’t talking about you or worse… pretending to actually be you.

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