Chapter 3
In This Chapter
Automating your Facebook marketing
Scheduling posts to Facebook with third-party tools
Setting up notifications
Connecting a WordPress blog
With all the third-party tools designed to manage your social media activity, the Facebook developer API (Application Programming Interface) has opened the door to great efficiency and automation. Automation is most interesting to those who manage social media for marketing because in that field it’s important not to miss a beat. Marketing types should be on Facebook all the time to make sure they reach as many customers as possible. Because there's no way for that to happen, they need to turn to some Facebook productivity tools to make sure that they have the furthest reach without maintaining a nonstop connection.
Facebook’s API allows third-party sites and web services to help you make your Facebook activity more manageable. In this chapter, we explain some of the ways that you can make it easier to keep your business pages and personal timeline active without having to sacrifice all your time.
Because you can’t be online all the time to post updates, respond to comments, add friends, or suggest Likes, you may decide to automate some Facebook tasks. Before you start, however, consider the purpose of automating your Facebook marketing. Think about your goals.
If you’re a marketer, you probably want to accomplish some or all of the following goals:
These goals aren’t accomplished through a “set it and forget it” mentality. Flying on autopilot works only with these important points in mind: You must have great, consistent content and activity that engages your consumers and followers. In other words, you have to connect with your supporters so they will continue to connect with you. Here are some ways to automate with such goals in mind:
Scheduling updates using a third-party tool such as HootSuite or Post Planner is a great way to consolidate your marketing activities and be more efficient. Some reasons why you might want to do this are
Post Planner and HootSuite are useful tools for users at any level. You'll find one of these tools useful if you’re sharing information on multiple social networks or if you want to be more productive by sharing specific marketing messages planned throughout the week, month, and so on.
HootSuite allows you to manage both your personal timeline and your business page, as well as Twitter accounts and other social networks. Post Planner focuses on posting content to Facebook profiles and business pages. See Figures 3-1 and 3-2 for examples of the screen view of HootSuite and Post Planner, respectively.
We find these tools most useful for creating updates that you want to share on multiple social networks. Both are free, and you can access them online through a browser. Post Planner is an app used inside the Facebook platform, whereas HootSuite can be used by logging in to their site or as an extension in your browser or on your mobile device.
HootSuite and Post Planner both enable you to post and to plan posts, but HootSuite also allows you to post to Twitter and respond to posts. On the other hand, Post Planner allows a huge array of content curation methods that HootSuite does not. Both allow multiple accounts, allow scheduling, and can be accessed through the web. Both applications also work with one or more business pages as well as personal timelines.
Following are some of the Facebook functions you can manage from these tools:
When you’re flying on autopilot, you need to make sure that you still personally respond to comments on your business pages. Notifications are a great way to be alerted when you need to respond to a comment.
To set up notifications for your business page, do the following:
The Notifications Settings page appears, as shown in Figure 3-4.
The Notifications Settings screen reappears.
The screen shown in Figure 3-6 appears.
Often times, the biggest source of traffic to a blog or website is social media sharing. You can post your blog on a page tab through an RSS feed (see Chapter 2 of this minibook), but this doesn’t drive traffic to your blog site. If you’re trying to drive traffic, perhaps to monetize your blog, you may want to use a third-party tool that automatically shares your blog posts to Facebook.
If you have a WordPress website (a common blogging platform), you can choose from any number of plugins to connect your blog to Facebook.
Following is a brief description of a few popular plugins:
To use this plugin, first you have to install it on your WordPress site and activate it, and then you need to create a Facebook page tab so that you can enable individual features that it provides as you choose. Simple Facebook Connect provides the following features:
After you’ve downloaded and installed the plugin on your blog, go to the plugin settings page, where you’re prompted to authorize Facebook to connect to the plugin. Then you’re ready to go. Check the Wordbooker settings page for other customizations. If you’re the administrator of more than one business page or group, you can select, with each post, which one you'd like to publish to.
Follow these steps to set up an application to connect your WordPress blog to Facebook:
The app name can be anything you want it to be, as long as the name isn’t already taken.
CAPTCHA is simply words and other characters that appear on your screen to manually verify you’re a real person.
The app’s Basic page appears. Make sure your contact e-mail is accurate.
The site domain is the simple address without the http:// prefix (such as example.com).
Scroll down and click the Save Changes button.
You can now see the completed page tab after you save your changes. You can find it also by pointing your browser to https://developers.facebook.com/apps.
Typically, when you're connecting your blog with a plugin, it will ask for the app ID and app secret. You find these on the app home page, just below the app’s name.