WW's new Facebook page

Many businesses have a presence on Facebook for advertising. Our new page is a little different - it's a user-group space that will only be only accessible to women booked onto WalkingWomen holidays (past or present). Here you will be able to arrange lifts or taxi shares for forthcoming holidays, and upload or download photos after the holiday takes place. You will also be able to use this space to stay in touch with other women who were on your holiday. Only women who were booked onto that holiday will have access to those photos and chat.

Why Facebook?

I appreciate that the Past Holiday photos have been hugely popular with the women who come on the holidays. However keeping these pages up to date is very time consuming and can take Diana as much as one day to produce one holiday photo story! Helping arrange lifts and taxi shares is also very time consuming for the WW office - and often your plans have moved on from when you booked. Yet we are committed to helping you for environmental reasons...

When we looked into it, Facebook proved to be the only forum which we could structure holiday by holiday (in the form of 'Events'). We appreciate that not all women will want to use this space - and we will still help you with lifts & taxi shares to the best of our ability from the WW office if you don't wish to start a facebook account.

However, we hope many of you will use this new Facebook facility to arrange your own lifts - and the more women who do it this way, the more successful it will be with less input from the WW office. For now, it's an experiment, and we welcome your feedback!

If you are already a Facebook user

This new forum/group is called walkingwomen. If you already have a Facebook account, please just type walkingwomen into the Facebook search bar, and request an invitation to the group. If you are booked onto a forthcoming WW holiday or have been on a WW holiday in the past, you will be confirmed as a member (we will complete these confirmations asap)

Once you are on the general walkingwomen group page, you can post discussion comments or write on the Wall - same as on any other Facebook page. We will also upload some of the new photos WW guides have taken when running holidays - changing them every so often. All WW users will be able to see this page.

In the Events section on the right are all the future 2009 holidays - just click See All to reach them. You can request an invitation to join an event that you are booked onto. You can ask for or offer lifts and taxi shares here using the wall, and other women can write back or reply to you directly.

By clicking the Past Events tab, you will reach the recent 2008 holidays that are no longer being added to the WW Past Holidays menu. You can request an invitation to join that event if you were booked onto that holiday. We have already uploaded the guides' photos here - which you will be able to see once you have been confirmed as a member. You can then upload your own photos to share, write comments on other women's photos, and use this space to stay in touch after the holiday.

Not familiar with Facebook?

To use Facebook you must open a Facebook account which is free. It involves giving your email, your name, a password, and your age.

Once you have an account you can upload a photo to represent yourself (it doesn't actually have to be a photo of yourself). If you don't upload a photo, a silhouette will appear instead.

If you are wary, and would only want to use your account to access the walkingwomen group and you don't want anyone else to be able to see your personal page, you can immediately set all your Privacy Settings to Only Friends (click Settings to do this). You can always expand your account later if you want. If you don't invite anyone to be your friend, no one else will see your personal information.

Facebook security

Like with emails, there is facebook spam and viruses. The simple rule is don't accept as a friend anyone you don't know. That's all!

We hope you find this new walkingwomen user space useful.

PS. For more help, click the About link at the bottom of your Facebook screen, then Help Centre at the bottom of that page.