We interrupt the 30-links-in-30-days linkbuilding campaign postings (1/2 way through at 15 days finished), to bring you a few helpful Social Media Tips on managing Facebook Pages.
Facebook Applications for Facebook Page Management
The best approach at this point in the development of Facebook is to use Facebook Applications, rather than tools external to Facebook, which much of the time tend to fail, quite regularly.
Thankfully we can report that there are several fairly robust Facebook Apps to help out with this management task. The main management tasks divide into three components:
- Managing the Facebook Page layout and design
- Managing the Facebook message posting
- Managing the response/feedback
We have found tools to help with the first two management tasks, Facebook page layout and design and the Facebook message posting. For the third task of follow up on responses, we are not aware of any reliable tools which make this easier than using Facebook itself (though using a particularly configured business account is certainly helpful and the task can be delegated).
Managing the Facebook Page Layout and Design
The best approach we have found is to use the applications Static FBML--with an astounding 11+million active users, Extended Info and More Extended Info (which is a clone enabling two different customizable info boxes).
What we do next is remove most of the built-in applications such as discussion, video, photos, etc. We love social media and sharing is great, but we prefer to manage our content on external networks such as the SEO Indochina YouTube and SEO Indochina Flickr accounts. When you deal with dozens of sites, having to manage duplicate content on multiple sites is both time-consuming and limits the linking-and-following behavior which brings customers to your other brand destinations.
Managing the Medium - Managing the Messaging
The meaning of Marshall McLuhan's famous The medium is the message is that the way in which information is delivered and the potentials within that shape of delivery is a message itself. Facebook very much as the linking and aggregating features of say, Google, however the individuals and smaller network of communication renders Facebook a neighborhood (a better characterization than the inapt use of walled garden). However, the use of Facebook for other purposes, namely marketing requires a different management model than dropping in on the neighbors to spend a few minutes or hours in social interaction, no matter how pleasant.
RSS to the Rescue
Thank goodness for RSS. The powerful RSS Graffiti application makes page management of multiple RSS feeds a pleasant affair, once the configuration and approval (per page) is accomplished. Click, click, click, clickety-click, click, click. Bah.
Final Suggestions
We prefer to use both the SEO website blog and the SEO Identica microblog as the source for RSS feed replication into Facebook. These are generally the two forms of messaging (besides perhaps an external email campaign management tool. Up next we are developing a WordPress plugin to enable posting messages from any WordPress installation and make message transmission into the various microblog and social network sites a single point of management.
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