Another week, another announcement from Facebook about new features. Since the IPO, we’ve seen a slew of interesting, new developments with the social network, and this week is no exception.
From new page admin options, to sponsored posts, to scheduled posts, we’ll walk you through the recent changes so you can get to work enhancing your brand, and taking advantage of the new features on Facebook! Whether you’re just starting your page, or are a well established brand using Facebook, these updates will have an impact on your strategy.
1. Facebook Adds Multiple Page Admin Roles
Ever been in a situation where you wanted to grant someone (an outside agency, a contractor, intern, etc) access to your Facebook page WITHOUT giving them the “keys to the city” and full control over your valuable page? Facebook has finally answered a call from many page managers who have been vocal about the need for granular control over Facebook page admins. Along with the introduction, they updated the Facebook page help files with useful information on what, specifically, each level of access allows.
As you can see, there is a great difference between “Manager” and “Insights Analyst” roles, scaling from limited access to full control of a Facebook page.
We recommend keeping this by your desk as a handy reference should you contract an agency or add another person to your social media team. This provides the perfect level of granular control necessary to prevent an unwanted user from ruining a page or making a mistake that could negatively impact your fans.
2. Sponsor your individual posts to have a bigger impact
As we mentioned in our last blog post, Facebook is now making advertising a bit more streamlined and simplified by embedding the ability to “promote” a post right as you create it. For a small fee, starting at $5 US, page managers can guarantee that the post is seen by more of their fans when they choose to promote a post.
On a personal note, Fanpage Toolkit, has already experiemented with a promoted post and has seen promising results. As you will see in the image below… We set a $30 budget, which runs over a 3-day span. After just 2-days, we spent $15 and received 975 additional views that were a direct result of the paid, promoted post. Out of those paid views we received 16 link clicks. If calculating the Click Through Rate (CTR), you would get a 1.64% CTR. Now, while we would like to see something more in the 2-3% range… what is good to know here is the Cost Per Click (CPC). Sorry, didn’t mean to through another acronym at you, but this stuff is important to know! If you have ever paid for online ads, you will know that CPC pricing on a high-traffic websites like Google, Bing, Facebook, Yahoo, etc… can run anywhere from under a buck to $5, $10, $20, $40 and higher. When buying ads in Facebook, we have typically paid anywhere from $1.50 – $3.00 per click on average. Therefore, seeing these 2-days worth of promoted posts data is looking pretty positive. When you do the math, we are paying just $0.94 per click and getting a whole lot more screen real-estate to work with, compared to those tiny Facebooks ads that are limited to 110 x 80 pixels. Lastly, because we are now getting more of those that like our Page and their friends to see our post… we are also increasing our EdgeRank score with Facebook. Meaning, lots of bang for our buck! NOTE: EdgeRank is something that we are going to talk about next week, so stay tuned!
3. Schedule your Facebook posts for later
As many social media managers know, scheduling posts for Twitter and Facebook can be an important aspect of content strategy. Going on vacation? Many managers typically turned to 3rd party solutions for their scheduling needs. Sites like HootSuite and TweetDeck found great business success based on this principle, but now, Facebook is throwing their own system into the mix allowing users to schedule a post right from their fan page.
Though, the addition of this feature is bound to have an impact on many page managers, some have pointed out that the scheduling tool falls short of expectations in several instances. True, while it’s not exactly a full-fledged scheduling tool, it will certainly expose a great feature to many who may otherwise have not considered using scheduling as part of a strategy.
4. One week to vote on Facebook’s next privacy settings
As many people know, security and privacy concerns have always gone hand in hand with Facebook’s rapid growth. Each change and update to Facebook’s privacy policies have stirred up public reaction, some calling into question the integrity of the social networking site. Now, Facebook seems to be giving users one week to vote on the privacy policies that impact everyone. Voting can be done from the Facebook Site Governance page.
We hope you can keep up with all the changes that are rolling out! As a part of our ongoing committment to staying on top of the latest in Facebook and marketing, we hope these weekly updates keep you informed.
Should you have any questions about Facebook’s changes, never hesitate to reach out to Fanpage Toolkit’s team of experts on Facebook, or send me a Tweet at @seerichards. I’d love to answer any of your questions about our platform or marketing strategy in general.
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