#PSEWEB

So you manage a page on Facebook. You have 4,000 “fans” and have spent $500 to get there. You’re thrilled management is buying in and the results are starting to show. You feel you got your money’s worth because you believe each fan is worth $3.86.

Once you have gained this mass amount of fans, what do you do with them?

You may be pressed with the feeling that you have to post each day, or that your fans are going to expect daily updates.

Realistically, the average facebook users will log in once every two days, meaning they get updates from their 130 friends and 80 pages. Unless your brand is something they want to see each time they login, you don’t need to be there every day.

A slippery slope on facebook is inundating your users with messaging. If users start to see your brand too much, and aren’t interacting with it, you won’t appear in their news feeds, due to the patented Facebook algorithm. Worse yet, users may just unsubscribe (goodbye ROI). The more interactions occur with your messages, the more likely you are to appear in a fan’s news feed.

Within your Facebook insights you have some powerful measures that can be used as Key Performance Indicators. Following these measures is actually seeing if your messaging is working. You may have 4,000 fans, but only be seen in 40 news feeds (it would be great if we had this information).

Here are some readily accessible performance indicators for your page.

• Monthly Active Users
• Unique Page Views (daily quotient)
• Post Quality ( a function of interactions per post on a weekly basis)

Keep in mind that unless your page is a location where users will seek out information on a regular basis, your messages to news feeds are your only real connection to users. Grouping posts, condensing messaging as well as creating baiting posts (subject of next blog) will help with this.

What are your challenges with managing a Facebook page?

-JP

As a personal user, the Facebook mobile applications have left me a little underwhelmed.

As a business user, the iPhone Facebook application is a great tool for anyone who has a Facebook Page – but doesn’t have any other properties (i.e. Twitter). Once you add Twitter, Hootsuite becomes a great tool but if Facebook is all you work with, then Facebook for iPhone gets the job done quick and easy.

The key is adding your pages to your favourites screen within the application.

Add Your Pages to Favourites

1. Open the app
2. Click the grid icon in the upper left corner
   
3. Swipe to the left to get to your Favourites page
   
4. Click the “+” plus icon in the upper right corner
5. Click Pages in the bottom right
6. Select the page you would like to add from the list
7. Done!

Updating Your Facebook Page

1. Open the app
2. Click the grid icon in the upper left corner
3. Swipe to the left to get to your Favourites page
4. Click on the page you would like to update
5. For a status update, go ahead and enter into the What’s on your mind? box
6. For a photo upload, click the camera icon to the left of the What’s on your mind? box

Huge thanks to @jjloa for this great tip at #pseweb last May!

Our redesigned alumni newsletter was emailed out this past Tuesday evening. On Wednesday morning, we created 3 separate bit.ly links and used each on a different social network when promoting the online newsletter.
We posted status updates with the links on Twitter and Facebook, and started a discussion including the link on our LinkedIn alumni group.
Twitter started showing clicks immediately, and LinkedIn showed almost no reaction at first. Facebook was somewhere in the middle. After a few hours, Twitter stopped showing activity, Facebook continued to plod along and LinkedIn started showing activity.
In the end, Facebook brought us the highest number of clicks (9 of a total 22). LinkedIn came in second over Twitter (7 of 22), and Twitter brought in 6 (of 22)
Here is a little table:

Observations:

• Twitter responded the quickest, but had little impact after the first burst
• Facebook and LinkedIn provided results over time: content on these networks has a longer lifespan
• Facebook yielded the best return for us but Twitter users were the most engaged
• The LinkedIn post would have been emailed to the 2,000+ members of the group whereas neither of the other networks would have had this type of support

Overall, I’m glad that there are services such as Seesmic/ping.fm and TweetDeck that streamline this for us – because 22 clicks is not a huge yield out of an overall audience of 3,306 (0.6%). LinkedIn is the service that I haven’t been able to streamline yet, which means that I have to post once to Twitter+Facebook, and then post a second time to LinkedIn – and it’s also the service that had the lower return.

Note: I could probably update all 3 in a single go via ping.fm, so I should look at this with our next announcement (though lately we’ve been trying to do individual posts on each network as much as possible, rather than carbon copies across all three). #hashtags seem to throw off some Facebook users, also Facebook has a higher character count as does LinkedIn, etc.

I am an awful customer. I want and want and want and I have NO sympathy for your issues. You are getting paid to serve me.

I am very open about service (or lack thereof) that I receive. Rogers has done more than well by me, Netfirms has been surprisingly available (although, they never did fix the issue), and then there are the ones I talk about with less satisfaction.

This week, I signed a new one year contract with a company that has ridiculous red tape to service, high prices – and has in the past randomly withdrawn extra money from my account that I still have not received back.

Why? My health. Their product is the solution, and as much as it bugs me to give them business, I’m not going to ‘kill’ myself over it.

(Think about how often I am going to recount my woes to other potential customers – hopefully they will lose more than what I’m paying them, in the form of lost business).

None of this is really my point (thank you for reading though!). When I signed my deal with the devil, the front staff asked me about my history with products of this type, what I was looking for, etc. They asked why I wanted to try the service before signing on and why I was reluctant to do business with them despite the strength of their product.

And they sympathized! They are so friendly and nice, and getting paid next to nothing. We’ve all been there. Most of us have worked places that we would have changed if we could have at the time – from fast food to marketing. As much as I want to grouch through the sign on process, I can’t take it out on this innocent, sympathetic, my new best friend, front desk person. It simply would not be fair.

As the ‘face’ of a recent redesign – I need to become the front desk person. Separating myself from the changes coming down from on high is how a webmaster or mistress can best survive the roll out of a new look and feel. Not many redesigns are done solo, and the person with decision making power is rarely the messenger when it comes to unveiling and softly enforcing a new web onto a community.

How do you manage change across the organization? How did your web team go about introducing and implementing change?