Facebook has been churning out the changes since pre-IPO, and many of these changes affect the things we do – or want to do – with our Facebook Pages and posts. I wanted to point out a few of these features, especially those I’m finding immediately useful.
1. Assign Admin Roles for Your Page
If you have several team members working on your Facebook Page or want to bring someone on for a specific task, however, were hesitant to give them full access to your Page’s admin section, Facebook recently added the ability to parse out admin privileges. As you can see from the chart below, there are now five admin roles, each with their own set of permissions.
The Manager has full access to everything. If someone is brought on to publish content to your Page, they can access everything except the ability to manage admins. The moderator doesn’t have or need the content creation or manage admins tools. The person handling the advertising for the page just gets access to ads and Insights. And someone who just analyzes your Facebook Insights gets no other access to avoid any potential mishaps.
2. See Overview of Stats Per Post
Admins of your Page can now see stats at the bottom of every post to get a sense of which posts are reaching more people. You can also hover over the stats links at the bottom of each post to see a graphical view of the stats for that particular post such as how many people the post reached :
And the percentage of your overall Facebook Page fan base that saw your post:
Screenshots of the graphical view of your stats can add visuals to your monthly report.
3. Promote a Post
You can now put money toward an individual post that will push it into more prominent view within the news feeds of your fans. As you enter a dollar amount, you will also see the approximate number of people who will be reached by your ad based on that amount so you can adjust accordingly.
Note that promoted posts can only be pushed for the first three days after you’ve published them. That means if you decide to promote a post two days after it was published, the ad will only run for one day.
4. Schedule Posts
This is a new feature that I do find useful, and I’m starting to use it in lieu of Hootsuite. Facebook isn’t playing as nicely with third-party apps anymore, and I’ve even noticed that my Hootsuite-posted Facebook updates are getting little, if any, interaction compared to ones manually added or scheduled directly on Facebook. Coincidence? Not when it comes to Facebook!
To schedule posts on your Facebook Page, click the little gray clock icon on the bottom left side of your screen and select backwards from Year, Month, Date and then hour and minutes (you can schedule at 10 minute intervals).
(Curious about the green “Buffer” button above? I’ve just started using Buffer App to delay some posts to come out later in the day so as not to bombard my fans and followers. That button is how it integrates into my Facebook Page. Take a look at Buffer App.)
Once you have the date and time set, click schedule:
To view your scheduled posts, go to your Activity Log. To do this, click the Edit Page button at the top of your Admin Panel:
Then Choose Use Activity Log. This is what you should see (a list of your scheduled posts):
Note that this feature can still be buggy. One friend reported to me that she cannot see any of her scheduled posts in her Activity Log but that they still go out as she scheduled them. Just something to keep in mind.
That’s a quick overview of new features on Facebook that could prove useful.
