Facebook have rolled out another update to pages. But unlike the last one that I feel may have hindered engagement this one seems to have been given a little more thought and actually, to page owners, could prove quite useful. It’s to their page insights, the analytics panel available to all admins running pages with over 30 “likes”.
The WV11 page I run has had the new insights made available to us today, and on first appearances I’m like what I’m seeing, It’s obviously geared up to encouraging you to “boost” or promote posts (pay for more people to see them) BUT in saying that it’s not too intrusive. The data it offers you is quite insightful and I can see it being really helpful to brands or organisations trying to maximize their reach – It has really good comparison graphs for trends and long range interactions and individual break down of stats for each post.
Here’s a grab of the currents stats from a photo album we created Saturday of images from the Summer Fun Day – You can click on it to open it large to see what I mean.
Clear and concise figures easy to read at a glance and all still exportable – although I haven’t yet tried to see how clear they are in CSV format – but I’m hoping they can’t be any harder to decipher than with the last insights update!
I need to play more to see what else it has to offer but on first glance it looks good!!
Thanks for sharing this Steph. As you know, I’m a Facebook Phobic, but I really need to do something about my organisation’s Facebook. A huge barrier to stepping forward is around whether we should have a page or a profile. We want to be able to join in discussions and groups of our member organisations and residents we work with who use Facebook – I’ve heard that if we set up as a page we won’t be able to do that. On the other hand I’ve also heard that organisations should have pages, not profiles. What advice would you give, based on your extensive and clearly magnificent experience with WV11?
Ahh the million dollar question pages vs profiles….
The rule of thumb is profiles are mostly private and for individuals. Pages are Open and visible for businesses, organisations, brands etc.
I refuse to “friend” orgs with profiles as I don’t know who is behind the account and so do I really want that person (or people) having access to all my personal details and interactions with friends?? Not really – My exception is my hair dresser – because there is a personal connection with the person who cuts my hair and actually she uses the messaging facilities on Facebook to manage appointments so even though she has a profile for her business the relationship is different.
But whats the difference for communication? Well profiles (individuals) can interact ON and WITH other profiles, pages and groups. Pages (orgs) can interact ON other pages and WITH individuals that post to their page.
But while pages limit interaction options it doesn’t stifle it
If you’re looking at the WV11 example, we have a high level of engagement via our facebook page ON our page, through our posts and posts by others, and through private messaging but the first message has to be sent by the individual – this is to stop brands and orgs spamming people (imagine if a marketing company behind several brands wanted to direct mail all of their fans….)
The key is be useful.
We were useful the the people we wanted to target and they keep coming back to us.
Offer consistency and usefulness to the community you want to appeal to and invite interactions. Tell people they can message you and invite feedback both from and between individuals and that will build you page as place people will come and communicate with each other and with you – and so the difference between a profile and page in terms of communication and interaction becomes almost negligible.
A bit rambling but I hope that helped.
S x
I’m (unsurprisingly!) with Steph on this one!
Profiles just don’t work for orgs. For ‘public facing’ org a page is best for many of the reasons outlined in Steph’s comment.
If you want some form of private/closed discussion, then the Facebook groups are ideal – these allow individuals (profiles) to join a group and discuss things away from the rest of Facebook. Groups can be open to join, or invite only, so you can control them closely and are ideal for discussion around a certain topic, or about an org.
Another major benefit of a page is that there’s no limit on the number of people that can ‘like’ your page – personal profiles actually have a limit on the number of ‘friends’ they can have (It’s a couple of thousand I think). Technically, you would also be in breach of Facebook’s T&Cs using a profile for an org as these are meant to be for real people.
You could use both – for example, in Wolverhampton the Local Neighbourhood Partnership service has PAGES for each of it’s regional groups, but the Neighbourhood Wardens (who work for the service) are now setting up profiles (such as ‘Joe Blogs Neighbourhood Warden’).
One last thing – from a user’s point of view there is less social commitment involved to ‘like’ a page compared to becoming ‘friends’ with someone. Bearing in mind that many of these interactions are shared / promoted to Facebook friends, some people may feel uncomfortable, for example becoming ‘friends’ with their local Police Sgt, but less so ‘liking’ the page for their neighbourhood policing team.
Steph, very useful information. I too refuse to friend organisations with a profile instead of a page. In my last job I had to do a presentation on this and wish you had written this 4 years ago (although as we know Facebook changes all the time).
The hairdresser story is interesting as my hairdresser has resisted using social media for her business (but is not a phobic as she has a personal profile) yet when her business phone line was down for a few days she realised that using social media would have been a useful tool yet she wants to make sure that when she does take the plunge the Page is not just a poster for the business but where communication and conversation happens.
Locally we have businesses who use their Page effectively and those that don’t.
Also the reluctance to use Facebook may be because some of the conversations in Groups used by the local community has become quite unpleasant and has required a lot of intervention and deleting of threads by administrators so I also understand this reluctance by some organisations to use Facebook as when this happens it can be time consuming and unpleasant.
Interesting take – and something I can see being an issue but not necessarily something I’d 100% agree with.
It happens don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen unpleasantness on Facebook but we very very rarely have to moderate conversations on the WV11 page as we set the tone and modeled the behavior we expected very early on.
The community are very good and moderating themselves – and moderating us too, when we get it wrong they tell us, we discuss it, offer apologies if needed and move on, but we expect the same from our audience too.
As whole we require very little intervention and rarely need to delete anything – In fact in 4 years and with over 5000 people interacting with us we’ve only ever deleted 3 conversations (and one of those was my own when I very badly worded something).