Authorizing Multiple Page Admins

It's Q&A time!

Reposting a comment from last week:

What happens to the page when the person who's the administrator leaves the organization? Is there some way the page can be "reassigned" to another Facebook user? The potential for an unhappy ex-employee to sabotage the organization's FB page seems worrisome.

Main Street Theater's next comment got it right:

You can make admins out of any of the fans or any of your friends.

After you create your Page, you can grant additional people in your organization Administrator access.

By doing that, you give them full authority over adding, deleting, and editing Page content -- AND full authority over adding/deleting other Admins as well. So if you're the Page creator, and you deputize someone else as an Admin, that person will have the power to remove you as an Admin later if you leave the company. And you'll have the power to remove other Admins yourself, too, if they're the ones leaving.

(Of course, that also means that if you're dealing with an "unhappy ex-employee" situation, you'd better make sure you delete her before she deletes you! There are no different "levels" of being an Admin; everyone has equal rights.)

You can change/add/delete Page Admins from the Page itself -- you should see an "Add Admins" link on the left side directly under the Page photo.

Your Facebook Account: All Play and No Work?

My next few blog posts will walk you through setting up your Facebook Page –- creating it and getting started with content. For today, though, I’m going off on a bit of a tangent. There seems to be a bit of concern about the connection between having a personal Facebook Account and being the administrator of a Page, so I’ll try to clear up some of that confusion.

To reiterate something I said in my webinar a few weeks ago: the first thing you need to do when creating your organization’s Facebook Page is sign in to Facebook.

If you’re accustomed to keeping “work” and “play” very separate in your life, you might be balking at the idea of using your personal Facebook account to administer your organization’s Facebook Page. The trouble is, you have to be a Facebook user to be a Page administrator.

"But Michelle, even when I’m not logged in to Facebook, it says right there at the bottom of the home page, 'To create a page for a celebrity, band or business, click here.'"

It's true -- you can click on that link and start the process of creating your page without logging in or even having an account. But once you get past the first screen of information, you'll be taken to a login screen and asked to sign in! This screen will also tell you that if you don't have a personal Facebook account already, you can enter your name and e-mail address and create something called a Business Account.

Huh. What’s a Business Account? A Business Account is a Facebook account with limited functionality, intended to be used by people who just want to administer Facebook Pages without actually "being on Facebook."

Sound goods, right? Does that mean you can create an extra throwaway account to administer your Page without linking it with your person account? NO. Here’s the catch (and I'm pulling this straight from Facebook's Help section):

"Please be aware that managing multiple accounts is a serious violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use. If we determine that an individual has more than one account, we reserve the right to terminate all of their accounts."

Yes, maintaining your personal Facebook account ("look, pictures of my cat!") and a separate Business Account ("nothing to see here, just running my organization's Page...") COUNTS AS HAVING MULTIPLE ACCOUNTS.

Can you get away with it anyway? Possibly. I know that some people do. I just don't think it's worth the risk. If you're sneaking around with multiple accounts, and Facebook decides they don't like it, they'll probably delete BOTH of your accounts, and then you're out of luck in regard to administering your Page.

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Now, that was a whole lot of words to talk about something that, frankly, I don’t think is a big deal.

First of all, I’m assuming that everyone reading this blog has a personal account on Facebook already. I can't imagine why you'd want the job of being a Page admin if you're not on Facebook yourself -- if you're not part of the community, you're going to have a tough time understanding how the community works.

This is just common sense: you wouldn't try to serve as the creator of your organization's e-mail newsletters without ever having read an e-mail, would you? (And, incidentally, this is the main point of my colleague Allison's article about Twitter that came out last week – check it out if you missed it!)

Secondly, regarding the work/play separation: the actions you perform as a Page administrator are not linked to your personal account anyway! So even if you want privacy, you don't have to jump through hoops and try to game the system. Just keep these lists in mind:

Actions that will show up as Page actions:

* Posting pictures
* Creating events
* Posting on the Wall
* Sending Updates

Actions that will be linked to your personal account:

* Sending Event INVITATIONS
* “Sharing” things (directly inviting people to become fans, and reposting events)

As long as you stick to actions on that first list, you’re in the clear.

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This post is already epically long, but I have one last thing to add: from my own perspective, all the things I've written here are not all that important. As you may have noticed, I'm all over the place already -- I’m Facebook friends with many people I've met only through work (hi!). Facebook's privacy settings work well enough that I feel very comfortable using my personal account for all sorts of work purposes, and letting people see that I'm a real person behind the blog and webinars.

I am interested to hear what you think, though. How do you manage your professional Facebook presence? Is the idea of work and play separate an important issue to you?

Why "Pages" might be better than Page Views

I realize that in these discussions about Facebook, both here on the blog and in my webinar last week, I've been spending a lot of time on the "how" without really addressing the "why," so I wanted to take a minute here to back up a bit. It's true that Facebook and social media are the things with all the buzz lately, but looking past that, what are the real reasons a Facebook page can help your organization?

Here's a question that came out of the webinar:

"What is the benefit of linking the facebook page to our company website? Meaning, why should we get more facebook fans if they are already visiting our website?"

My answer has two parts.

1) Here's a graphic you might have seen if you've been to any of Patron Tech's seminars in the past four or five years:


This illustrates the "e-marketing paradigm" of how your Web site and e-mail newsletters should work together.

"If I can get someone to join my e-mail list, I can market to them forever. But if they come and go without leaving a trace, I've missed a huge online marketing opportunity to contact them directly." (Web Sites for Culture, Eugene Carr)

Replace "e-mail list" with "Facebook Fan Page," and the concept stays the same. If a patron is on your site, that's great -- but who are they? What do they want? And how can you contact them again? By getting that visitor to become a Fan, you get to find out who they are, and you can continue to communicate with them in the future, rather than just passively waiting for them to visit your site again.

And my second point:

2) People spend a LOT of time on Facebook. They don't spend a lot of time on your site.

As of January, the average visit length on Facebook was just over 21 minutes (source). We know from our own research at Patron Technology that the average arts Web site visit is around 5 minutes long. Your patrons are already used to spending more time on Facebook than on arts sites. If you post your content on your Facebook Page, that means they won't need to go out of their way to see it.

Ticket purchases or donations are one thing, and you should certainly drive traffic to your Web site for those, but if you have content worth sharing, why do you need to coax people to visit your site at all? An article or photo or video that you post on Facebook is automatically an invitation for comments, for further interaction and engagement, and for people to easily share your content with their friends.

Coming later this week: more specifics about linking to your Fan Page from your site and e-mails.

I'm Going Live!

Just a heads up, in case you've missed our other announcements: I'm hosting a live webinar on Thursday, all about Facebook for arts organizations. Some of the information I'm presenting has already been posted here, but I do have some new stuff plus a live demonstration of at least a few "how-to's."

The webinar is on Thursday, April 2, at 1:00PM Eastern time.

If you're interested, just click here to register. Thanks!

Cultivating a Community

I keep promising to answer the excellent questions I got from readers in response to my first article (back in February), so here we go!

Stephanie from BRIC said:

I’m still conflicted on the Page vs. Group issue for non-profit arts organizations. Especially in New York, where the small and mid-size performing arts organizations are part of a network where everyone knows one another... Audiences who don’t come from within the community often want to be a part of it – make a personal connection, rather than feel like they are part of a commercial enterprise.

A friend of mine is a Fan of 245 pages. He’s a Fan of Kermit, The Daily Show, the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw, The Little Prince, Spinach, Burberry, Muffins, Macbook, the IDF, Tommy Hilfigger, Sushi, Levis Footwear -- the list goes on. ...Pages become more of a statement of aesthetic than a place he actually visits and interacts with on a regular basis.

Stephanie raises a good point about creating a more community-oriented space on Facebook -- and it's evident that she wasn't the only one to think so! By now you all know my thoughts on the NEW Facebook Pages: They're designed to be so much more community-based and interaction-friendly than they were before. Now Page administrators have more control -- as long as you're posting compelling messages and discussion questions, the Page can be made to feel much less like a "commercial enterprise" now.

So I think that in some ways, her question might be answered already. Since "fans"can now interact much more directly, I think that the new Pages feel a lot more like the old Groups now.

I have to stand by my opinion that Groups are simply outdated technology, at this point. They still don't get News Feed real estate, they can't be customized, you can't add apps... (I know I haven't gone into technical detail yet about HOW to do some of those things with a Page, but I'm still waiting for Facebook to settle down and stop changing things.)

That said: I think that Groups can still be a valuable tool for arts organizations, especially in situations like Stephanie describes, where the organization's artists and managers DO want to be personally associated with the org. Maybe one solution is to create both, but be sure to delineate a separate purpose for each -- have a Facebook Page with more generalized, public content and event information, but also include a big link to join the organization's Group, which would have a more personal feel.

I'd love to hear more thoughts on this! What do you think? Do the new Pages seem like a better environment for making a personal connection than the old ones did?

A Few Answers

Aha! Here's the reason Page updates aren't appearing in the newsfeed. This is the message appearing at the top of the Facebook home page right now:

Pages are now a part of News Feed
From now on, posts from Pages you are a fan of will show up in your News Feed. You can hide their posts by clicking the 'x' in the top right corner of the post. If you would like to see posts from Pages you connected to the in past, click here.

That last sentence is not as clear as it could be. Basically, they've defaulted all the Pages you're already a fan of to the "hidden" list -- that's why they're not showing up in the feed. If you click on the link in the message, it opens a box with a list of all the things currently "hidden":


So you need to go through and click all the "Add to News Feed" buttons, manually.

(Why? Why should people have to do all this work to be able see Page updates? I don't understand why Facebook keeps shooting itself in the foot this way. If the whole idea of turning Pages into Public Profiles was to make them more integrated and accessible (and, presumably, profitable...), then why in the world did are they making users jump through all these hoops?)

Anyway, it probably wouldn't hurt to send out a real Update to your fans reminding them to click that link and unblock you, or at least to post about it on your Page (of course, who knows if anyone will see it!).

(PS: extra points to Lara, commenting on my previous post, for discovering the "See hidden posts" link before Facebook put up this message. )

Feeling Frustrated with Facebook

Hi, new readers I met at the ArtsReach conference last weekend! Thanks to all who attended PatronTech's pre-conference day -- I hope you found it helpful and valuable.

I know the blog's been a bit quiet this week, and here's why:

Frankly, I'm finding myself fed up with Facebook.

Now, I'm not counting myself in the camp of those users screaming, "BRING BACK THE OLD FACEBOOK!" -- I *like* the new Facebook, or at least I like its potential. Everything I said in my last article remains true: In theory, the new "Public Profile" Pages offer arts orgs a great opportunity to connect with fans.

It's just that in practice, there are a whole bunch of little features of the upgrade that seem either poorly thought-out, or outright broken.

Here's an example, from an e-mail I received this morning:

"Hi Michelle. I've been doing status updates for our Facebook page, but as far as I can tell, they are not showing up on our Fans' walls. They don't show up on my wall, and I just checked with another person in our organization who is not an admin but is a fan, and the updates are not on her wall either.

Is there something I need to do to make the status updates show up on our fans' walls?

I'm also having problems with the Page where parts of the page appear layered over other parts. Sometimes the pictures of the Fans move around and appear on top of other sections."

(Short answer: both problems *might* be a browser issue? Try looking at FB in Internet Explorer and Firefox, see if the problems exist in both. There doesn't seem to be a definitive solution yet, though.)

If you take a look at the discussion board for "Facebook Pages/Public Profiles," you'll see that these issues are not the only ones. Problems with Pages are rampant! And they're not being addressed by Facebook at all. Since the launch, there hasn't been a single announcement from FB that they're aware of these issues, that they're listening to their users complaints... nothing.

So, I'm pretty frustrated.

That said, I will be blogging more regularly next week -- I was asked a whole novel's worth of excellent social media questions last weekend, and I'll start to dive into those soon.

Again -- feel free to comment! Are you frustrated by Facebook too? Is your Page experiencing these formatting problems?

Thanks for sticking with me!