Facebook: The good, The bad, and the Shameless Plug
Have you heard about this new thing called Facebook?
Okay you got me I couldn’t even keep my face strait long enough to start out like that. Odds are you know Facebook and odds are even greater you have either a personal profile or maybe even a Facebook Page for your group or business that you oversee. I myself happen to oversee a Facebook Page for my work and have found out a couple new things that I’d like to share. Odds are good you might / probably already know this but in case you don’t hopefully this will help you out.
The Good
I mentioned earlier that there are Facebook Pages and Facebook Profiles. If you have use Facebook as yourself you are (should be) using a Profile. This is a bit different from Pages. Ideally Facebook wants people to use Profiles and businesses, groups or fictional characters to use Pages. The distinction can get a bit fuzy and there are pros and cons for each. If you have a Page you can have multiple people administer it where as for Profiles you would have to give someone else you personal logon password (which you should never do in my humble opinion). When you have a Profile and create an event and select your friends to be a hosts and share responsibility but with Pages you don’t have that option. So what is the one cool thing I wanted to talk about with Facebook Pages? The ability to Schedule a post for a later time.
If you have a business odds are good you have upcoming events that you want to talk about, promote or even remind people about. Well the thing is when you need to post it you might not be near a computer or when it’s time to post you might be busy with something else. Scheduled Posts is a great way to do exactly this. All you have to do is prepare your post like you normally would and then instead of clicking “Post” click the dropdown arrow next to it and then select what day and time in the future you want. Once you schedule a post you see this nice little box below where you can see your upcoming scheduled posts. I don’t think all your posts should be scheduled in advance but if you have say an upcoming event first you share it to let people know and set up a reminder or two in the future to remind people not to forget to attend. All and all this is a great feature that once discovered has become an invaluable tool for our online strategy.
The Bad
If you’ve used Facebook Pages before you know their whole point of being is to get you to engage your audience. Fact of the matter is this probably one of their biggest revenue sources. By getting more people into Facebook they can move more ads to them and are more than happy to help you get more engagement with people if you pay them to. Now I’m not sour on that because I understand Facebook has to make money somehow. Since we don’t pay them for their service they have to make it elsewhere. The bad though comes from their filtering algorithms. I have a friend who is a training chair for his district. He made a Facebook Page where he gives his thoughts on training and informs people about upcoming ones. All and all I enjoy it a lot and think it’s a great idea. Once I heard about it I liked it without any hesitation. Then as the weeks went by we came to a Day when we were running an Intro to Outdoor Leader Skills training and some of the participants were thanking him for all the posts he’d been doing lately. I was shocked because in my day to day I hadn’t seen anything from that Page in my feed. The problem was Facebook’s algorithm had decided that since I hadn’t engaged with the page I didn’t’ want to see it’s posts. So that is the bad thing right now. If you aren’t actively going to the page, looking at, commenting on it, liking posts you risk Facebook not showing you anything in the future. So let’s say you found a page/group/community/whatever that you to follow and you want to make sure you see what all they’re doing. Well thankfully there is a way to make double sure Facebook shows you what they do and that is to say you want to get notifications of what they do. All you have to do is click the dropdown next to the Like Button and select the Get Notifications option. 
The Shameless Plug
If you were curious about this Training Page you can find it over at https://www.facebook.com/OutdoorLeaderSkills . Feel free to join and get involved in the discussions.
Too Long Didn’t Read
Facebook is an amazing tool. It can be a bit frustrating at times though if you don’t understand all the small nuances. These two tips about scheduling posts (The Good) and not seeing things in your feeds till you tell them you want to (The Bad) can make your experience on Facebook better.