Who should be in charge of your Facebook page?

Who should be in charge of your Facebook page? - article content

This article will cover the basics of Facebook Pages and Facebook Page management, and who should be managing your Facebook page. This article expresses the view of Candytech/Soci­albakers – a view of historically managing 50 different Facebook pages for our clients, having developed 200 applications for Facebook, and delivered thousands of tabs.

People – Internal or external?

After creating the page, you should probably figure out – who will be managing it? Who will be responsible for the posts, for the content, and for its management? Obviously oversight is one thing, but doing the work is another thing. The first question that comes in place is, if this management should be done internally or externally. Really depends though on what type of brand are you. Are you an FMCG company, alcohol drink, Mcdonalds or a similar type of company? In this case, I don`t think there is need for a social media manager to be internally. You can be sending pictures of offers, fries, and cheeseburgers all month long and it works perfectly well. Some brands like automobile, telecom, banking, and obviously as well as media companies require a more hands on approach, which means the person has to be internal.

The second question that comes in mind is – who is the owner of the Facebook page agenda? Is it the PR/Communications department? Is it Marketing, or even customer care? We`ve seen many options, that I will outline:

• Cross functional team, marketing leading the tabs, PR leading the posting
• Purely the marketing team, with PR sending them messages, them posting them
• Purely the PR/Communications team, with the marketing team sending them information about new campaigns

There is no right or wrong approach, I can just share experiences on what works better or worse. In some cases, marketing is typically focused on one campaign too much, has a tendency of posting a set of posts about only one thing, forgetting about the big picture, just looking at the campaign. The communications department might on the other hand look too much on the big picture, and not go into specific content, which is what people have interest in. A cross functional team might have issues communicating.

Typically though an entry from a communications department is always required, and it should be able to be a quick entrance – for example one of our banking clients (who uses the cross functional team, but the communications team posts on the page), where the communications department is communicating with the fans, and theyre doing a great job with responding. They even deal with very touchy issues, like single moms writing them that they as a bank wont consolidate their debts, which no offense to the marketing department – has to be managed by a PR person.

Obviously the customer care department is always involved somehow, because you have to have a good response rate to your fans on your page, it`s a very important channel.

Its on every company to choose who will be in charge of social media internally and externally. If externally, always make sure that these people are well briefed on the brand message and news from your company. If its is managed internally, make sure there are clear competencies around the Facebook page management, and everyone knows what should be done, and be responsible for doing it.

Next time we will talk about tools you should have on your Facebook Page, and the chain of suppliers who should be working to assist and boost your Facebook page.