Social media: clever Facebook management

Oh yes, Facebook again! Facebook is the largest driver of website traffic out of all of the social media platforms so shouldn’t be ignored. However, you can end up spending hours planning content, sharing content, conversing with your fans and networking with other pages. There are some really clever tools to help maximise your business’ potential on Facebook, and minimise the amount of time you spend on it, and you should be using them.

Scheduling content

The first time-saver is making sure you can content multiple posts at once so you can
spread your posts out and don’t have to be on Facebook every time you want to post content. Facebook has its own scheduling tool that makes this easy for you, all you need to do is click on the small arrow next to the “publish” button and click on “schedule”. Then you just need to enter the date and time you want the post to be published. If you want to manage all of your accounts in one easy location, or automate the scheduling process then you can use some other management tools such as Hootsuite or buffer.

Analysing effectiveness

By this I mean analytics. Most social media platforms, Facebook included, have analytics built into them now. They not only track how effective your posts are (the reach and engagement), but also the breakdown of your fans including where they come from, their age, gender, what time of day they’re active, lots of information. This means that you are able to work out who your target market is on Facebook and which content works best, a bit of a winner when it comes to marketing strategy. If you use other management tools, some of them have low levels of analytics built into them, including Buffer, Bit.ly and SproutSocial. They’re basic, but if you’re using them as management tools for content then it’s handy to be able to see the effectiveness of posts and link-sharing.

Managing comments and posts

When your social media is really effective and you have people commenting on posts, writing on your page and sending your messages, it’s increasingly likely that you’ll miss something. When people comment on your posts, they’ll ask questions about stuff that is totally unrelated, you might get spam posted on your wall, so you need to keep track of it. Facebook is now measuring how fast your response rate is to your Facebook fans so you do need to keep on top of it. Agorapulse ‘listens’ to your social media responses, notifies you of any new activity and you can categorise different actions and respond to them in bulk. You can use Agorapulse’s own categories or create your own, and once your Facebook following becomes unmanageable from Facebook itself, this tool will help you to stay on top of it, vital in the day of social media customer service.

By management, this means a mix of planning, scheduling and analysing your Facebook posts and success, and as your Facebook followers grow, this becomes more important. As a public platform, you need to be seen to be responding to enquiries, dealing with problems and posting useful content for your audience. Make sure you’re being savvy about the management of your Facebook page so that you don’t make any fatal errors .