Article first published as Three Tools to Help Manage Your Facebook Page on Technorati.
If you’re using Facebook as a marketing tool for your business, it can be a challenge to balance the time you need to spend on Facebook and the time you need to spend at work.
It’s important to be able to react quickly to someone who comments on your Facebook page. It shows you value your fans and will encourage more people to comment. The more you interact with your fans, the more they will be willing to do business with you.
But Facebook doesn’t make it easy. The social networking site doesn’t provide a way to notify business owners when someone comments on their page. After all, Facebook’s goal is to get you to spend more time on Facebook. As a result, some enterprising companies have stepped in to fill that void and offer services to help you manage your Facebook page.
**Update, July 2019: Nutshell Mail is no longer available.
Email service provider Constant Contact offers a management tool called Nutshell Mail that not only works for Facebook, but Twitter and LinkedIn too. Nutshell emails you the latest posts from your Facebook friends, the pages you manage and the pages you like. You can receive hourly reports, seven days a week, or less frequently than that. You can reply to a Facebook post right from the email by clicking on a “comment” icon. You can also reply or retweet a comment from your Twitter followers within Nutshell too.
Mediafeedia is a new management tool strictly for Facebook. Their interface allows you to post directly to Facebook or schedule posts ahead of time. You can attach links or photos, and manage up to 5 pages for free. A pro version will be available soon that allows unlimited page management, and gives the user the ability to create custom tabs.
Mediafeedia will notify you by email when someone comments on your page, but you can’t control when those notifications arrive. When I tested the service, I received an email about an hour and a half after someone posted on my page. If you haven’t been getting any notifications at all, that’s an improvement. But I’d prefer to be notified right away or at least on an hourly basis.
Hyper Alerts* will send an email as soon as someone comments on your Facebook page. You can set up alerts for as many pages as you want. And if you don’t want to be notified immediately, you have the option to receive notifications on an hourly, daily or weekly basis. That’s all Hyper Alerts does. But if you already use Ping or Hootsuite to schedule Facebook posts, Hyper Alerts is a good addition to your management toolbox.
*Note: As of January 27, 2011, Hyper Alerts says it can only provide hourly updates for the next few days. The company has to move its site to a new server to meet growing demand.
Thank you!
Very Interesting.
Glad you enjoyed the article.