Facebook, Business Friendly At Last

Facebook has never been business friendly. In its early development focus was rightly on the end user, controlling networking activity within its closed wall environment.

At one time Facebook Pages required you “Friend” each other with your personal profiles if you wanted multiple people to manage a business page. Now you’re only required to “Like” the page to be made an Admin. The problem then came if a rogue employee decided to delete other Admins! Meaning you really had to trust those that you allowed to manage your business presence.

Posting to a Facebook Page has also posed an issue for business. Audience activity on Facebook did not always correspond with normal office hours, in fact a lot of prime activity takes place evenings and weekends. Making it very difficult for a company to manage and of a brand that outsources it’s Social Media marketing, it’s hugely prohibitive from a cost perspective.

Bring On The Apps

Social Media tools have made management of platforms a lot easier. Hootsuite and BufferApp, my particular favourites, have allowed for a lot more flexibility when it comes to account management.

Hootsuite allows you to have perfect control over who can access your Social Media accounts without having to give them direct access. There is also a scheduling feature for posting out of hours.

BufferApp adds another dimension to scheduling in that you can predetermine the time slots for posts to go out and just populate the slots.

Making a post effective on Facebook though requires your updates to appear in end users feeds. Whether they did or not relied on a simple algorithm based on popularity and engagement. According to Facebook “On average only 16% of an individual’s friends will see a post that person shares”. Combine this with the fact that an average user has around 200 Friends on Facebook then your content really has to work hard to get seen.

The App Effect

In addition there is the “possible” 3rd Party App issue!

A study last year by Applum, showed that updates posted by 3rd Party Applications, such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck, performed much worse in terms of visibility, and therefore engagement, than updates posted directly through Facebook itself. In fact it showed a drop in engagement of a minimum of 70%, and whilst Facebook insist they have fixed this issue many are still reporting inconsistencies.

Your Schedule

Now it seems Facebook has solved both issues in one go. It’s latest update allows for both multiple Admin Roles and Scheduled Posts.

There are now 5 Admin Roles:

1. Manager: Can manage admin roles, send messages and create posts as the Page, create ads, and view insights.
2. Content Creator: Can edit the Page, send messages and create posts as the Page, create ads, and view insights.
3. Moderator: Can respond to and delete comments on the Page, send messages as the Page, create ads, and view insights.
4. Advertiser: Can create ads and view insights.
5. Insights Analyst: Can view insights.

This should allow for plenty of flexibility when it comes to allowing employees and outsourced resources manage your Facebook Page.

Scheduled Posts although not very refined do allow for you to natively organise future posts right down to the nearest minute. You can also manage all scheduled content from the Activity Log within the Admin Panel on your page.

These two simple updates should make Facebook a much more business friendly place. With the recent IPO and the slide in share price, Facebook need to do all they can to ensure they stay relevant.

How will you manage your Facebook business presence?