The 10 worst things about managing a branded Facebook page

At Tempero, social media management is our thing and we manage a huge range and volume of Facebook pages for clients as varied as Activision, CEOP, Sainsbury’s, UK Government and more, and although incredibly powerful for brands, Facebook wasn’t designed for large scale interaction on a page by page basis.

To illustrate the problem…

Managing your own Facebook page is relatively easy isn’t it?  Now imagine that each time you publish an update, within one hour, 600 people post a response and 10 to 15% of those are inappropriate, offensive, spam or downright rude.  Then imagine people are doing the same on your discussion area, your photos, videos — or any other area you’ve allowed them to interact. Clearing the latest content is your best plan of attack, but what happens when an older posts picks up attention for some reason?  You then have the issue of having to hunt around your now frenetic Facebook page for new posts, any one of which could be a reputation or legal nightmare waiting to happen.

This scenario perhaps sounds a little over-the-top but it’s actually a live case study and mirrors many of the large Facebook pages we look after on a daily basis.

Here’s our top ten Facebook issues…

1. There’s no moderation queue

2. There’s no swear/spam filters (update on this since this article was first written – please see below)

3. Ability to contact users about their content depends on their settings

4. You don’t get user alerts – they go straight to Facebook

5. You may have to trawl through 1000s of fans slowly to try ban someone from a page

6. There’s no audit trail of what you’ve edited or deleted

7. Search is poor

8. There is no way to change moderation status (pre, post or reactive)

9. There’s no content workflow

10. It’s time consuming when managing large pages

The update on point 2 above is that Facebook have now introduced a profanity/spam function. Whilst this is great news for page owners and something that is very much welcomed, there is still a certain lack of control here that ultimately requires that a human moderator still reviews all content. The profanity filter currently has a choice of ‘none’, ‘medium’ and ‘strong’, but without knowing the difference between ‘medium’ and ‘strong’ and what that might mean for your brand, it means that there is little control for the page-owner.

Likewise the so-called ‘block-list’ allows you to add in free-text of your choice, which means that any comments that include certain words will be hidden from the front-end. Again, this would then require a moderator to review these hidden posts to ensure that perfectly aceptable content wasn’t being unpublished from the page.

To be honest, many of the other points in the list above are non-issues on low volume pages and I don’t want to paint a picture that Facebook shouldn’t be used —  In fact, far from it. And thankfully, managing high volume pages can be solved through using a combination of  companies such as ourselves and the new wave of 3rd Facebook moderation tools.

We’ve teamed up with iPlatform, a long standing app development company, and had input into their ‘Conversocial’ Facebook moderation tool.  The system effortlessly plugs into Facebook and addresses many of our top ten concerns. It doesn’t remove the need for human moderation/administration but for large pages the return on investment is obvious.