France has one. Germany and England, too.

Wasn’t it time for the central bank of the United States to launch its own Facebook page?

Yes, indeed-y. The Federal Reserve Board introduced its new social media effort this month “with the aim of increasing the accessibility and availability of Federal Reserve Board news and educational content: go.usa.gov/xDTbV”

Ah. The deathless prose of the Fed, to the delight of one and all:

The Fed never breaks character, posting to Facebook like the monetary authority that it is, ignoring the trolls and the trashers who greeted the announcement with comments like this:

Posts like these get more likes than the Fed’s original offerings, which often begin with: Did you know?

Marketing 101, part 1: Figure out your audience before choosing and sharing content. Maybe look at the pages of competitors/cohorts. The Bank of England has a very cool video on the new “fiver” — five pound note — probably because many Facebook users in the UK are likely to use a five-pound note. Even so, The Old Lady can’t escape the trolls:

The page for Germany’s Bundesbank is positively inviting. In fact, the top post is an invitation to come see “exciting exhibits” in its Dusseldorf office. The page,  with just 2,377 likes, appears to be troll-free. Perhaps they fear that Herr President Hans Tietmeyer or Chancellor Angela Merkel will come pay a visit. Erschreckend! The Fed has nearly 17,000 likes and nearly as many trolls.

Note to anyone who cares: You can visit the Fed’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., as part of a group, if you are at least 18 years old. Maybe that will make it on the Facebook page. Maybe not.

The New York and Minneapolis Federal Reserve banks have tiptoed onto Facebook as well. Predictably, the trolls are all over NY posts on the debt crisis in Puerto Rico in a New York minute:

Marketing 101, part 2: Make sure users can discover your pages.  U.S. News & World Report notes:

If one searches for “The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System” instead of “Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System,” he or she will be directed to a page with a post that refers to the Fed as “a group of banks running a national counterfeiting operation with the protection of the government.”

The post then links readers to the End the Fed campaign’s website.

Perhaps the Fed could have eaten its cake and had it too by taking a page from the European Central Bank: It has skipped over Facebook and headed straight to Google Plus. No one ever goes there. Not even the ECB.