When does managing a Facebook page become a full time job?

When does managing a Facebook page become a full time job? - article content

As you know, Socialbakers is here for you to crack down the most important social media facts, figures, and metrics. Of course, for us as Socialbakers is owned by Candytech – a Facebook marketing agency, so we have some great insight when managing our clients Facebook pages. For us managing Facebook pages indeed is a full-time job – but is it like that and should it be like that for other social media marketers?

As we shared last week in our article: “How often you should post on your Facebook pages?” – we basically said that most brands should post on average 5 – 10 times on a weekly basis. Obviously, just posting the 5 – 10 posts is not a full-time job (depends on the content and if you have to produce the full extent of it). But what about replying your fans? If you have 10 fans, you probably don`t have to chat with them all day long, but if you have 100 000 of them, you will be swamped with 10 – 30 wall posts on average on a daily basis, plus about 30 – 50 comments per each of your posts, and you should take the time to respond. So in that case, it is a full-time job, and possibly for more people!

So what is the ideal number of fans when you should have a dedicated person for your Facebook page? Again, there is no exact science, just best practices. For example we have clients that have 10 000 fans, and 1 full-time person manages it, in another case we have a client with 100 000 fans, where there is a team of 3 full-time people built around the Facebook page. Looking back at the AT&T example we shared a while back, AT&T responds to 45% of all user posts on their wall, and most of these posts they respond in the first 30 minutes, and they should be very proud of that. AT&T probably has an around the clock non-stop customer care team that is dedicated to Facebook and operates all day long, which is a fantastic dedication to this channel, and more companies should manage it like that.

Looking on ourselves at Socialbakers, we get a couple wall posts a week, some comments (more on the site), and we have 35 000 fans, and for us to manage our community on our Facebook page takes roughly 1 – 2 hours a day, but obviously managing it on our portal where most of the interactions are done are 2 full-time people. We believe that when we move up to 100 000 fans, we want to have someone full-time on our Facebook page – but that is just our case, in some cases I believe even 1 or 2 thousand fans can be a full-time job, if for example you are in specialized B2B, and one key influencer can bring you business in millions of dollars.

Bottom line message here is: Make sure that social media communications stays a dialogue, not a monologue, and if you are a brand and are doing this directly or indirectly through an agency, in both cases, make sure that your Facebook page is not only about posts sent from you, but also about responding posts that were sent to you. That is quality social media management.

Jan Rezab
CEO Candytech/Soci­albakers