With over 60 million Facebook pages, businesses across the globe have discovered the value of maintaining a presence on the world’s most popular social media site. However, many companies find out that setting up a Facebook page is not just a set-it-and-forget-it affair.
Moderating Facebook business pages can quickly become a time-consuming distraction, leading business owners to question the value of having even set up their pages in the first place. Luckily, Facebook provides a feature-rich moderation interface that allows businesses and their Facebook administrators to choose how much freedom to give users and, consequently, how much time they are forced to spend on moderation.
You can control all visitor posts on your page
Facebook gives you the power to control whether visitors can post content to your page, including text, video, and photos. You can decide if you want to grant visitors the right to post any or all these formats to your page.
If you do decide to allow visitor posts, then you have two moderation tools for unwanted content. You can either hide the unwanted material, in which case only the user who posted it and their friends will be able to see it. Alternately, you can delete the post altogether.
Reviews can be helpful, but you have less moderation authority over them
Many businesses with Facebook pages choose to allow reviews or recommendations through the Reviews or Recommendations tabs. These can be a great addition to a business’ Facebook page, allowing any registered Facebook user to leave detailed reviews of their real-life experiences with your business.
However, some businesses may find these features troublesome. The page’s administrator can directly moderate neither reviews nor recommendations. Any review or suggestion that doesn’t follow Facebook’s Community Standards document will be removed after being reviewed by Facebook staff. In some cases, reviews or recommendations that are wildly off-topic or that otherwise contain situation-inappropriate content may also be removed.
Once allowed, reviews and recommendations cannot be edited, hidden, or deleted directly by the page administrator. However, it is at the sole discretion of the business, whether they allow or disallow the Reviews or Recommendations features in the first place.
Responding to your page’s visitor comments
One of the most powerful features of having a Facebook page for your business is the ability to interact with customers directly, especially when addressing customer concerns.
Facebook gives you two ways of responding to customer comments, reviews, or other content. The first is in a publicly viewable message. This response mode can be seen by anyone with permission to view your page.
The second means of responding is through a private message. Unlike private messages elsewhere on the Facebook platform, when business address customer concerns in secret, a message will be displayed so that all page viewers know that the customer’s issue or comment is being addressed. This is a particularly useful feature when dealing with issues that are of a highly personal or sensitive nature.
Facebook business pages are still a powerful and feature-rich means of connecting with customers
Facebook’s business pages offer companies a highly evolved means of connecting with their customer base. By allowing businesses to choose precisely how much time and effort they want to spend on moderation, Facebook has created a platform that can meet the social-media-presence needs of nearly any company.
For more information on putting your company’s best foot forward through expert use of social media, please see WebPurify’s recent post on the 22 best tech blogs.
