How to manage a Facebook Page more productively

Facebook Business Pages can be one of the most effective marketing channels for a small business — when managed properly. But with all the demands of running a business in the modern world, success isn’t about working harder; it’s about working smarter. If you’re a busy business, read on for tips to productively manage your Facebook Business Page.

Why Facebook Pages need active management

Most businesses know the importance of having a functional Facebook Business Page, but few realise the need to actively manage it.

To begin with, you have to post regularly for your followers to find you on their timelines. The platform prefers frequency over intensity and you can’t limit your posts to a couple of days of the week.

Secondly, you should know that it’s a platform for public engagement between you and your followers. Unlike a website, your followers can leave favourable or unfavourable comments and you need to actively monitor your Page to manage those perceptions.

To make it easy for you, here are some proven tips to help you productively manage your Facebook Business Page.

Ideas for effectively managing Facebook Business Pages

1. Dedicated resources

As a small business owner, you have to wear several hats. You have to take charge of sales, marketing, customer support, accounting, and networking, just to name a few. Amidst all these, social media management shouldn’t be treated as another miscellaneous activity.

If it’s possible, you need to allocate it to a competent team member. If that’s not viable, you should devote 15 minutes to half an hour every day.

Remember, it’s better to be regular with your posts than to bombard your followers with several posts in one go. Also, periodically conduct a time-audit to figure out where you’re spending most of your time on social media marketing.

Are you mostly responding to messages or crafting content? Do you have time to look at your online reviews? These will tell you if your attention is too limited to one particular activity.

2. Digital agency

If your budget allows it, you should consider hiring a digital marketing agency. The upside is that you’ll have a team to monitor all your digital activities, including, your website, SEO and social media marketing.

If you hire an agency, consider a trial period to begin with. Give them measurable objectives and evaluate their performance.

If you don’t have the budget to hire one, relax. If you can manage your personal Facebook profile, with some effort, you can easily manage your Business Page too.

3. Content strategy

Simply put, it means that you should have a medium-term plan to create and post content. The most important part about content is that it should be interesting or add value to your followers.

So, if you’re a salon owner, you can post pictures of your customers, with their consent. You could also post about the spring or summer styles that are in vogue. But you should also write about how your customers can take care of their hair.

For example; “5 ways to care for your hair when it’s humid.” Instead of linking an article from outside, see if you can summarise it. That’s because Facebook doesn’t like people leaving their platform and so, won’t show your links that often.

Also, your content should be a mix of text, images, and video. You don’t have to be a professional to shoot a video. All you need is a good smartphone.

4. Content calendar

Once you know your strategy, it’s important to formulate a content calendar. It should have four buckets; service-specific, sales-driven, user-oriented, and hot topics.

Service-specific should include posts about your service, specialisations, and any new improvements or additions to your business. Sales-driven content is about offers or discounts that are time-bound.

For user-oriented content, look beyond sales and see how you can add value to your existing and potential customers. These could be tips, suggestions, or best practices, like the one about hair mentioned earlier.

Your topical content should be tied to any celebrations or events in your region. The easiest way is to print out a list of all festivals and ’national days.’ If you’re a baker, you should have social media posts for the National Chocolate Day weeks in advance.

5. Concentrated effort

One of the best hacks to manage your Business Page is to take out an hour or two every week to create all your content. Treat it as your deep-dive content creation time. By chunking similar tasks together, you can get into the flow and maximise productivity.

Don’t write one big post. Write several short posts and schedule them for the coming week. Shooting videos? Take four of five so that you can post them for a couple of weeks.

6. Audience engagement

Once you start rolling out content, you’ll notice that some get disproportionately more likes and comments than others. This should tell you what works and what doesn’t. Figure out what your audience likes and give it to them.

If interest starts to drop off, though, it could be that you’re posting the same thing too often. Figuring out your peak posting frequency is equally important.

You could also ask your followers through a poll about the content they would like to see. Make sure that the choices are within your comfort level.

7. Automate and optimise your workflow

Apps are your best friend for managing social media. There are several tools that will help you get the most out of your efforts. Monday is what you need for collaboration and better teamwork. Clickup will bring all your goals, tasks, and chat in one place to save you time.

Buffer is one of the most popular social media management tools out there. Hootsuite simplifies social media marketing. Canva is your free platform for easy-to-create social media templates, videos, and graphic design.

8. Manage Facebook messages

One of the reasons you should spend at least 15 minutes every day on social media management is to ensure that you respond to messages quickly. Facebook - and your followers - don’t like when you take too long to reply.

The second thing you can do is create pre-set messages to thank your customers for leaving favourable reviews. You should create multiple mails so that they don’t look like copies.

Finally, you should have a system to request reviews. If you can’t do it on your own, there are highly recommended third-party apps that can help you with review generation.

In short

To successfully manage your Facebook Business Page, you should start seeing it as one of your core functions. Importantly, you have to be consistent, and customer-oriented in your content. You should also automate whatever you can to save time and improve efficiency.