Throw It Our Thursday… Time to clean that task list! There seems to always be a task that you look at and dread. One that has been on your list for days and sometimes weeks and you keep avoiding it! You know the one – when you read over your list you are like”Man I still have to do (X)” and your whole demeanor changes – take that list and move ti out a week or two and schedule it to be done on a certain day. You will find some freedom from the dread and have a little more energy! The deal is you HAVE to complete it on the day you have scheduled it – but is is a win win…. you are free from looking at it now and it WILL GET DONE! Have you set your reward for Finish It Friday?
Facebook Management can seem overwhelming at times, there are tools out there to help you handle what you need to do!
Tools to help manage Facebook:
There are several “tools” out there to assist you in Facebook and even will help with other Social Media outlets, some are free and others you pay for. It is important that you start to use the items there for you to ease the overwhelm and even save time. Sure there will be a learning curve when you start out – put as my favorite saying goes: “10 minutes in preparation saves hours in application” so be prepared and learn the tools that are here to help!
Tools to help manage Facebook posts:
One of my favorites to use is Ping.fm – this is a free tool you can register your Facebook account with along with several other Social Media platforms and “Ping” a message to all of them at once. It is awesome to announce events, share a quote, share a special offer. A word of caution, I would not use this for every update and post – I am sure you have several “friends/followers” in common across the platforms and you don’t want them looking going “they already said that” because they read it everywhere.
is a tool that gives you the ability to pre-plan your Facebook posts! In one sitting you can have your marketing planned out for the day/week. It is an ap that will load onto your Facebook account. They have a free trial for 30 days. As for the program it has a free version, this one will allow you to pre-plan posts for your Facebook personal profile, then there is a Pro version that allows you to pre-plan posts for your Facebook Business Pages and your Groups for $4.95 per month and a “white label” version that will allow you to post to all those places BUT at the bottom in little writing it is your company name that links back to your website if clicked, that will be at pre-launch $17 per month with full price being $19.95 when launch stage is over. Again to use this tool you want to use it strategically…. schedule your posts but still go in from time to time and do personal ones.
One of the first “scheduler” programs was Tweet Later now known as Social Oomph- it was centered around scheduling your Tweets for Twitter along with an auto-follow feature for Twitter that when someone followed you, it would automatically follow them back and it would send them a Thank You message for following you. They later opened this up to work with Facebook as well – the Twitter actions are in the free account but if you use the paid version ($29.97 per month) you can to a TON with your Social Media interaction and updates! Check it out
Tools to monitor the Facebook Business Page activity:
This is a tool offered by Facebook to monitor the activity going on with your Facebook Page, you want to use “Insights” – you can access this through your Facebook Business Page on the right side . Click it and it will share statistic with you about how others are participating on your Facebook Business Page. This is very helpful to monitor because you can see what items attracted more interaction and what ones did not.
Wonder how you can ever keep up with everything going on with your Social Meida accounts, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on?? I found Nutshell Mail from Constant Contact – this is a fairly new tool and it brings all of the statistics and happenings to you in your inbox! You can choose how many updates via email you receive – you can also choose to connect your Facebook Personal Profile, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare, MySpace, Yelp and CitySearch to the notifications. This can free up a lot of time because you can see what is going on at one glance and know where you need to go in and post, update, interact and so on! Also, the tool is FREE! For example, in my Facebook notification, it tells me how many “friend requests” I have waiting for me, how many messages I have to reply to with excerpts from them for me to see, group invites, event invites and I can customize what I get in my notification. I am still testing it but love what I see so far!
As I mentioned there are so many tools out there to use for Facebook and other Social Media accounts – picking the right ones for you is important. As always know what you want to get out of that tool. Know what your need is for that tool. Don’t go out there and sign up for every magic tool they have then overwhelm yourself on the learning aspect of each one and with the decisions of what to use what tool for when! Keep it simple. Keep it easy. The tools you use should be saving you time!
Stay focused, Social Media is here for you to be Social – you should be using Facebook to build your relationships, network and have fun – don’t get too caught up on the tech side…
“Social Media is about sociology and psychology more than technology.” – Brain Solis Principal of FutureWorks
I hope you check out the few Facebook tools I mentioned here – please feel free to comment with any feedback or contact us with any questions we are always here to help YOU!
To work with Facebook more efficiently you have to use click.to!
Thank you Jayden for the photo upload resource for Facebook!