Managing Your Facebook Page

If you set up a Facebook Page for your small business or non-profit, you will eventually have fans begin posting comments to your wall posts or directly to your wall. Of course, that will only happen if you set up your Page correctly to allow fans to post such things. If you haven't, I suggest you read a little bit about how fan interaction influences EdgeRank.

At some point, someone will post something inappropriate on your page. Some people might even post criticisms of you or your organization. How are you supposed to manage this?

It's pretty simple. Encourage people to get involved in the conversation on your page. If something inappropriate comes along, deal with it swiftly and appropriately. If you're really having to actually think about this, then you are thinking about it too much.

The first thing you need to do is determine who will be posting to your Facebook page. It is important that these are people who can communicate effectively. These people will be the only voice of your business or organization.

Next, I recommend developing a flow chart to help determine how to handle certain comments posted to your page. You can feel free to leave SPAM of the chart if you wish, because I'm pretty sure everyone knows to delete that type of stuff. But what about the other comments?

If you are going to build a relationship with your customers through your Facebook page, you have to let go. Seriously. You have to let your customers feel like they are free to discuss anything about your business. However, you also need to make sure that comments posted to your page are relevant and do not hurt the innocent. This is where that flow chart comes in handy.

I recommend developing a flow chart with four categories: Appropriate, Inaccurate, High Risk, and Low Risk. The first category is pretty self explanatory. But we still want to define how to respond to Appropriate comments on your Facebook page.

Responding to Appropriate comments may seem like a no-brainer, but you need to consider who is going to respond to comments. You should also consider what kind of Appropriate comments merit a response. For example, an Appropriate comment concurring with your post (i.e. "+1") doesn't merit a response from you. However, you may want to concur with someone else's post or comment, and possibly provide additional information to support that comment. It is important that you have a plan for responding to comments, even if those comments are Appropriate on every level.

Next, you need to know how you will address Inaccurate comments. These are comments that are providing misleading information. These should obviously be corrected swiftly, and most of the time these will not merit deletion. This is where you will want your Communications and/or Public Relations people to step in. (Considering who you are going to have respond to Inaccurate comments, it might be helpful to also classify media requests into this group for simplicity's sake.)

The final two categories are your Risk categories. These are comments that merit deletion. High Risk comments included violent or inappropriate comments. This category also includes allegations against your organization. These are the comments that need to be assigned to whoever handles Risk Management in your organization and may even include your Public Relations people. These comments should be dealt with swiftly, both via deletion and risk mitigation by press release (or whatever method your company prefers), because it is likely that someone read that comment before you were able to handle it. 

Low Risk comments include inflammatory statements or offensive language. The comments that fit into this category typically merit deletion but no further action on your part.

So where do you classify criticism? You might not like my opinion: Appropriate. As long as the criticism does not fit into either Risk categories (especially High Risk), you should let the criticism stand. This is your opportunity to publicly address an issue. By letting criticism stand and addressing it, you can show the rest of your fans that you are willing to handle problems that may arise. You've heard the saying that goes something like "a happy customer tells one person while an unhappy customer tells ten", right? Well, it is your opportunity to show many people beyond just the unhappy customer and his peers how you will work to rectify a situation. This helps build trust with your customers and strengthens your relationship.