How to Streamline Your Facebook Activities
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I know many professional organizers who aren’t taking advantage of Facebook to market their businesses. Their reasoning is sound: “I help my clients to make the best use of their time and space. It just doesn’t make sense for me to waste time on Facebook or other social media sites.”
If you associate Facebook with playing games or completing quizzes like “How many kids you will have?” I can understand why you wouldn’t see how a Facebook presence can be beneficial to your business. Keep in mind, however, that you can be on Facebook without ever participating in these types of activities. Taking a moment to manage how this type of content ranks in your news feed will save you from spending time and energy filtering through the updates of your friends who do.
Here are a couple of ways you can use automation to make sure that Facebook doesn’t distract you from more important activities:
- Use a plugin or app to automatically post an update when you publish something to your blog.
- Pre-schedule your updates using Buffer or HootSuite without logging into the Facebook website. Take advantage of this to post helpful tips at various times throughout the day and/or week, even while you’re out working with clients. This keeps your name in front of your target audience, and allows you to increase the frequency of your updates without having them all show up one after another.
Although these strategies allow you to maintain a presence on Facebook without even logging into the site, it’s important to visit on a regular basis ito communicate with other users, especially those who have commented on your posts. The name of the game is social media, and if you don’t engage with others, they’ll stop trying to engage with you. You should be able to manage this in 15 minutes or less per day. That is not a lot of time, so you’ll want to use it wisely. Give priority to these activities:
- Check your notifications, to see if anyone has responded to any of your comments
- Visit your business page, if you have one, because comments posted on there will not normally appear in your news feed or notifications. While you’re there, check for spam reviews – they seem to be more prevalent than real ones these days.
- If you’re a blogger, do a little networking in the Blogging Organizers group.
Once you’ve completed these steps, if you haven’t used up your 15 minutes, you can explore other things that may be going on. If you tend to get distracted, set a timer so you don’t get off track.
If you’d also like to use Facebook for sharing news and photos with family and friends, do that at a different time, not during the 15 minutes allotted to your business.
Try it for a couple of weeks, then come back and share your results!
Photo credit: Beth Kanter
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It is a good idea to schedule at least 15-30 minutes to visit your business social media page once a week to review your activities. You can download the Business Suite Meta App on Android or iOS to get notified of any immediate activities. And, if you have more than one business page, you can see all the pages in one app.
That’s good to know, thank you for sharing!
I got involved with FB fairly early on in my business. It was the “big one” back then, and I’ve enjoyed it ever since. Now I have moved onto other platforms, but I use the Business Suite Meta to do my scheduling and tracking. It takes care of FB and IG at once. I have it on my phone and my laptop. With my eyes these days, I prefer looking at things on the larger screen, but the app is handy when I’m away from my desk.
Whichever platform you use, I do think being present and interactive helps!
Absolutely! Being seen is one thing, but engaging with your followers is what’s going to make a difference.
For so long, Facebook has been a frustration to me. For my personal life, I rarely post anything except my puzzle scores (or an occasionally interesting article). I don’t think I’ve written about my own life on FB much since before the pandemic, and scrolling through to see friend’s posts is hopeless because I’m seeing so many ads and accounts I’m not following. I’m good about not “playing” on FB when I’m logging on to conduct business, but I sometimes wish it would go the way of Google+ and disappear!
On the business side of things, I got to the point where I was dreading posting anything on my business page because so many things would go wrong. For almost two years, almost any account I tried to tag would not even recognize whom I was trying to tag unless I uploaded the post, then went back and edited it, and then it would recognize the accounts. Somehow, two or three weeks ago, tagging accounts from my business page started to work, and now posting my blog on my business page on Monday takes about two minutes, vs. the twenty minutes of trial-and-error it previously took. (Before, I could type @nameofFBaccount I was trying to tag, and it wouldn’t recognize it at all, even if it were a company or government agency I was following!)
I do check my notifications, but find that most of the business page features have expanded beyond my understanding. I know, I need to explore those back-end features in greater detail.
Julie, I have to confess I don’t do much with my business page anymore either, because when I was posting regularly, hardly anyone was seeing my posts. I’m active in a handful of business groups though; that seems to be where the good conversations take place.
We use the Meta scheduler for Facebook posts. It helps me to be able to set aside time every two weeks (or so) to focus on this task. One thing that has helped my engagement and brought me business is sharing content from my business page on local facebook groups. Certain groups have a wide audience, which I don’t have. We offer tips that may interest people.
That’s a good idea! I do believe groups are the way to go these days.
I use the Meta scheduler and it saves me a ton of time. I like to go into Facebook itself every so often to engage in organizer and neurodiverse related facebook groups. You can also post in up to 3 facebook groups that you have joined when you post through Meta.
I didn’t know that, Jill – thanks for sharing! Though for the groups where I participate, I can’t think of a time I would schedule a post. I generally either comment on someone else’s post or have a specific question I want to ask that group.