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Owners of business pages on Facebook have some new tools that will make them very happy. They are things that we have wanted for some time, and they are finally here, or almost here.
Administrator Roles
The first is that pages now have the ability to assign different roles to page admins. Up until now, being an admin on a Facebook business page was an all or nothing sort of thing. If someone was an admin, they had full control over anything on the page, including the ability to boot other admins. Clearly this is problematic.
Now, as you have multiple admins on your page you can assign one of five roles to them, giving them various capabilities, all the way from full access and control, to just seeing the insights. This chart from Facebook’s post about admin roles gives you a quick breakdown:
In order to find these, go to your admin panel: Manage > Settings > Admin Roles (formerly Admins). there you will see that each of your admins has a role assigned, initially defaulting to “Manager”. You can use the drop down menu to change the role of each person, and you’ll get a description of what their new capabilities are.
Think this through. You should have multiple admins on your page, and you should carefully assign these roles. In fact, the presence of these new roles might make it easier for you to add new admins, if you had been concerned about handing full control over to others up until now.
Schedule Posts
With social media being near real time, it is hard for us to keep up with our business pages by posting content in a timely fashion. After all, we need to sleep, enjoy our time off and weekends, and take vacations. Up until now you would need a third party app to schedule posts on Facebook. While I don’t have this ability on my page yet, Facebook is now rolling out a feature that allows you to schedule a post to be published at a later time or date. (Actually, you can also backdate a post, and it will fall in on your Timeline at that date and time. I have a few concerns about that as businesses could use this to make it look like they posted something at some time that they actually didn’t. Use it carefully!)
This is especially helpful for small business owners and managers who are dealing with a lot of different tasks throughout the day. One of my clients is a chef who owns a restaurant. For her, once she gets active in the kitchen for the day, it’s a lot harder to post on Facebook. Now she can schedule posts so that they appear at just the right time, without having to take a break from cooking. There are plenty of reasons why this is an incredibly useful feature.
Promoted Posts
Oh, and there’s the also the “Promote Post” feature, which allows you to pay as little as $5 to have a specific post show up “more” in the newsfeeds of your fans. I might write about this at a later date, but I’m not sure I like it. This is one area where I would prefer Facebook to let it’s algorithm do it’s work, rather than try to create paid placement within the newsfeed. I’m OK with the ads in the sidebar, but I’d rather see the newsfeed be a bit more organic. I haven’t tried the feature to see how it works, but let’s just say I’m a little skeptical.
Have you seen these new features on your Facebook page? How will you be using them? And what other features would you like to see Facebook add to the business pages?
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[...] tip to Ken Mueller for alerting us to this new [...]
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