6 Facebook Marketing Tips for Managing Your Facebook Page

#1: Check Your Wall-posting Preferences

Does your page get a lot of, ahem, critical commentary on its timeline? Or maybe just more than you have time to deal with easily? If so, it might be time to set your page’s Posting Ability tab so that only your page admins can post.

Here’s how: Choose Edit Page from your Admin panel. Then choose Edit Settings.

You can add/remove admins directly from the Admin panel.

From there, edit the Posting Ability tab and decide if you want everyone to be able to post on your page, or if you want to allow only your page admins to post.

You can adjust the posting ability to fit your page’s needs.

While I normally advocate allowing open access to a page, and even leaving negative posts up so your customers and future customers can see how you deal with criticism, for some businesses it’s just simpler to let people message you privately if they have an issue. Setting to “Posts by Page Only” also prevents Facebook users from spamming you.

You’re able to choose to allow everyone to post to your page or limit posting.

#2: Use Insights to Determine What’s Working for Your Page

There are two basic types of Facebook page admins: Those who post based on hunches as to what motivates engagement, and those who look at Facebook’s Insights to see what actually drives engagement.

Checking Facebook Insights will help you give your fans what they want. For example, if you notice that the posts with images have better reach and engagement than those that are text only, try removing the images to see what happens.

Since Facebook is always messing with EdgeRank, it can seem like just when you have figured out the formula for engagement, something changes. Checking Insights will help you stay on track, no matter what algorithmic changes Facebook throws your way.

A few months back, Facebook did a complete overhaul of Facebook Insights that walks you through the latest features.

Facebook Insights provide valuable information about the actions of your fans that can enhance your Facebook presence.

#3: Assign Admin Roles

Facebook allows five different administrator roles: manager, content creator, moderator, advertiser and insights analyst. Each role has different capabilities—only managers have the ability to change each admin’s role. Facebook makes all admins managers by default.

Each admin level has different capabilities for a Facebook page.

You can have as many admins on a page as you want. To add an admin, go to Edit Page on your timeline and then click Admin Roles. Scroll down and select Add Another Admin.

Note: To make someone an admin of your page, the person must have liked the page.

To prevent conflict among your employees and before you assign your Facebook page’s admin roles, establish some company-wide guidelines. Some things to consider:

• Have a quarterly Facebook training session. Discuss roles and address etiquette and expectations for employees who manage the page. At the quarterly meeting, discuss new Facebook features, address concerns about previous posts and talk about new tactics that you’d like to implement.
• Define the voice of your page. Each individual has a unique voice, but when representing a business or brand on a Facebook page, the page admins should work together to form a consistent voice. Make sure that your page admins understand the established voice and that they are expected to use that voice when communicating with users and fans online.
• Keep a shareable document (e.g., a Google doc) that outlines company social media policies. Employees should refer to the document at any time when they need to know what to post—and what not to post. This document should also include recommendations about how to interact with your Facebook fan base.
• Keep admins to a minimum. Don’t give just anyone admin rights to the Facebook page. The fewer people managing a page, the better. Two or three admins actively updating, responding to inquiries and managing the page are plenty.
• Keep communication between admins open. “If you’re not sure, ask!” is an elementary concept, yet it’s an important one. Whether responding to a particularly difficult user comment or sharing an article on the timeline, establish a rule of thumb that if any admin is unsure about whether something is appropriate, s/he should ask another admin for an opinion. Encouraging page admins to have open communication with one another will help reduce mistakes.

Adding new admins is easy as long as the person has liked your page.

#4: Choose Your Featured Likes 

Liking other business pages helps you build connections (and when they reciprocate, gives you added exposure), but you might not want certain pages to be among the first things visitors to your page see. Luckily, you can control which of the pages you’ve liked appear on your timeline.

Five of these likes are displayed at any one time, and the five that appear randomly change each time the visitor to your page refreshes—unless you edit which pages appear.

Why would you want to do this? You might want to feature pages that are related to your business. Or perhaps you want to feature pages that you think will be relevant to your readers. (If you pick more than five, they will rotate randomly.)

To choose featured likes, go to your Admin panel, choose Edit Page, then Edit Settings. Next, click More and then select Featured. From there you can edit your featured likes.

Try choosing featured pages that are relevant to your business that you think your fans would like.

#5: Bookmark Facebook’s Page Guidelines and Reacquaint Yourself With What’s Changed Recently

Facebook changes its terms of service…often. And unless you follow the company’s blog or frequently check their Page Guidelines, it can be difficult tokeep track of what’s allowed—or not—during a given month.

Of course reading social media blogs like Social Media Examiner will help you stay in the know, but page admins should still bookmark Facebook’s Page Guidelines and read the document at least once a quarter.

The constant changes of Facebook’s Page Guidelines require businesses to read and reference them often.

#6: Use Facebook as a Page Instead of as Yourself

Chances are if you’re the admin of a page, you simply head over to your business page and when you comment or post, you act as the business. But did you know that you can actually change your profile so that you are on Facebook as a page and not just as a personal profile acting as an admin on the page?

Why would you want to do this? If you happen to own or work for a B2B company, it’s a good way to build alliances with other businesses that are in your same industry (but aren’t competitors).

Let’s say you own a restaurant. You’d want to interact with hotels nearby so that when people check out the hotel’s page, they see your (positive and helpful) comments and are motivated to check out your business. Of course there’s a fine line—you don’t want to post too often or be so complimentary that your posts appear insincere, spammy or otherwise annoying. But posting as a page is a great way to network with similar businesses and leverage the marketing power of Facebook.

To act as a page on Facebook, click on the Settings icon in the top right corner of your Facebook profile and you’ll see an option to “Use Facebook as” with a list of the pages for which you’re an admin. When you choose to “Use Facebook as a Page,” you are able not only to post and comment as that page, but also your news feed contains the updates from the businesses your page follows instead of your personal friends and page likes.

Using Facebook as a page offers a variety of benefits to B2B companies.

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Best practices for developing a social media policy

The Society for New Communications Research Best Practices committee has spent a year researching corporate social media policies. The project included gathering case studies on companies’ blogging policy development and implementation for companies managing internal and external corporate blogs and other forms of social media. From this research, the committee developed a set of SNCR-endorsed best practices. We now present these 27 best practices and policies for developing and implementing corporate blogging policies and guidelines.

From research, six factors emerged as the highest priority in the successful development and implementation of a corporate blogging policy. These include:

Culture: Foster a corporate culture of openness. Listen to and respect the opinions of employees, customers and other constituencies.

Trust: Employees should be trusted to communicate and develop relationships with customers. Do not review blog posts prior to posting. Trust your employees to be good communicators and to use good judgment.

Training: Provide complete training about how to blog, and review legal issues with employees. Give employees the option of training rather than requiring them to participate.

Transparency: Disclose connections with customers in blog posts. Reveal any commercial or personal connections. Transparency and authenticity are key.

Accuracy: Check facts. Check with colleagues before publishing content that will affect them. If you write about private conversations, ask for permission before publishing.

Comments: Develop and clearly communicate your organization’s comment policy. Set expectations and clearly communicate what is and what is not allowed on the blog. Allow negative and positive comments, but restrict inappropriate comments. Write to the person who commented first.

Best practices for developing & implementing a social media policy

The following best practices will also help organizations to successfully develop and implement corporate blogging policies and guidelines for their employees.

Legacy guidelines: Use existing human resources and communications policies. Start with the employee communications agreement that is already in place in your organization as the foundation for your new policy. Provide guardrails for employees so they can safely and successfully engage in social media practices. Employees often seek help and guidance when they are considering launching a blog. Provide them the resources they want and need.

Developing new guidelines: Include company bloggers in the process of developing corporate blogging policies and guidelines. Think ahead in your social media policy development. Develop policies that will extend to other new and emerging communications technologies such as podcasts and video, etc. Once published, distribute guidelines widely. Companies that have facilitated wider distribution had their guidelines shared virally.

Legal Department: If you have a legal department, include them in the process but don’t let them drive the effort. Seek input from legal when developing blogging polices.

Employee Communications: If you have an employee communications department, partner with them to develop these new polices.

Whose views?: Clearly define if the blog reflects the employee(s)’ opinions or the company’s perspective.

Allow constructive criticism: Is it permissible for your employees to provide a differing point of view from management’s position? A culture of open communication will provide the strongest foundation for the successful rollout of a social media program.

Responding to comments: Set up a mechanism for responding to every comment that requires a reply.

Acknowledge mistakes: Acknowledge mistakes and fix errors on your blog in a timely and open manner.

Deleting confidential information: If information needs to be deleted because it is confidential and was posted in error, delete the information and state why the information has been deleted.

Podcasts and videos: Make sure employees understand that the mp3 files associated with podcasts are permanent and that it is not possible to remove mp3 files in the same way it is possible to take down blog content. The same permanent nature applies to video files.

Social media: The policies developed for blogging and company websites apply to employees using other types of social media.

Protect privacy: Consider, define and clearly communicate to employees what information is appropriate or inappropriate to disclose.

Respect your audience: Respect your audience’s privacy.

Respect competitors: Do not write about competitors in a negative way. Be respectful of others in your industry.

Consider the impact on revenues: Consider this carefully, and remember that that if you talk about a new product, service or feature as a public company, you are required to account for the revenue in the quarter that you announced it.

Disclosure: Make sure you identify your relationship with the company.

Customer feedback loop: Let customers know you listened when they post feedback. Respond appropriately.

Citations: Cite material included in your articles, and provide links to original sources where possible and appropriate.

Don’t break confidentiality: Don’t write about confidential conversations.

Communicate this policy clearly to employees: Err on the side of caution. Recommend to employees that if they believe a conversation might have been considered confidential, check with the person/people prior to publishing.

Platform: Companies that choose to encourage all of their employees to blog can either provide a common blogging platform, or invite their bloggers to select the platform and domain of their choosing.

Pace of adoption: Realize that adoption of social media does not have to happen all at once. It is a process.

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