Is Facebook pissing you off?

by on August 14, 2012

Is Facebook Pissing You Off?Ahhhh, the love/hate relationship many small business owners have with Facebook.  A social media tool that can be so fun and such a great biz booster, but then makes you want to rip your hair out on a regular basis with its tricks and inconsistencies.  Sigh. Why can’t relationships just be uncomplicated?

When it comes to Facebook, the only control you can really exercise is control over yourself.  Educate yourself on the little glitches of Facebook, adapt, and then let it go.

Last summer, we talked about whether you are pissing off the social media giant with your (often very innocent!) Facebook mistakes, such as using the proper type of business page, how to properly do contests/promos, and avoiding being marked as a spammer and getting booted off Facebook for a punishment period.

Now, like all relationships, there are 2 sides, so let’s turn the topic around to how Facebook just might be pissing you off with its intricacies and just plain weird set-ups that can put a major damper on your small business’ experience on Facebook.

“Others” Messages Folder

One of the trickiest tricks Facebook pulls is the mysterious “Others” messages folder.  “Huh?” you might be thinking.  Point proven.

To see the “Others” messages folder, you must look along the left hand side of your Facebook page, click “Messages” and then click “Others”.  You might be surprised what old stuff you find in there. When I was first alerted to this folder by Erika Napoletano with her awesome post about rescuing your messages from Facebook’s “others” inbox, I zipped right on over to mine to see what gems I might have hiding there. All kinds of messages I would have wanted to receive, including one from a client – argh!!!

How to get around this? Once you’ve opened your message in the “Others” folder, you can click the “Actions” button and then chose “Move to Messages” to receive future messages from the page or individual into your normal messages inbox.

Unfortunately, as a small business owner, messages from your Facebook page are probably being sent to your fans’ “Others” folder. I personally had tons of messages from Facebook business pages here.  One of the reasons that sending messages to your fans via Facebook is often not the best tactic, but we’ll have to save that topic for another time.

Email Updates: Not Trustworthy!

While you might think this is a handy way to be alerted about what’s happening on your Facebook page, you can’t rely solely on email updates when managing your page. You will get some updates, but in my experience on my own page and managing pages for clients, I only get a notification for a small amount of the actual activity on the page. To be aware of everything that is happening on your page, your only option is to head to Facebook on a regular basis to be sure you are responding promptly to your comments/posts/messages.

 “Share Page” Tool Doesn’t Really Work

Every Facebook business page has the option to “Share Page” under the “Build Audience” tab. If your page is fairly new and you’re planning to reach out to your friends and family asking them to support your business page, this share tool is not as ideal as it might seem.  Yes, it’s super easy, but the message in my experience doesn’t actually get to the intended recipient in many cases. I suspect that it ends up in the “Others” pile as mentioned above.  The best way to introduce people to your page and get them to like it is just to contact them directly.

Search Function… YA right!

Anyone who has ever tried to use Facebook search will back me up on this one. In a nutshell, it really sucks. Only exact match searches will work to bring up the page you’re looking for. In other words, you need to know EXACTLY what the page is called to bring it up. And half the time, that doesn’t even work. I’ve searched the EXACT spelling of a Facebook page plenty of times without it showing up in the results, including pages I’ve already liked. Go figure. If you’re searching to see if a business is on Facebook, your best bet is to head to Google and go to their official website and then find them on Facebook from there.  Sad, but true.

Regular Fans/Contributors = Spammers???

Facebook can be rather quick about marking real, credible people as spammers. If someone is regularly posting something on your page, or puts the same thing on your page as another page: Bam!  They’re marked as spammers.  On my own page, I’ve definitely found true, legitimate comments marked as Spam – in one case from a totally awesome small business owner that often participates on my page. For this reason it is important to check in to your page’s spam filter once in a while in your page’s backend. Click to your “Activity log” then under the “All” tab on the right hand side go to “Spam”.

Facebook spam

Promoted Posts: Friend or Foe?

The word on the street about this is mixed – promoted posts are a touchy subject.

Here’s the scoop: rolled out this past May, promoted posts are for pages with more than 400 likes. You can promote any kind of post by clicking the “Promote” button on the post and then choosing a cash amount ($5-$100) that will augment the number of news feeds your post will appear in.  (Note: this is not the same as Facebook Pages Ads – this is a completely different form of paid advertising).

Many people are questioning why they should have to pay to get their content shown to their fans; paying for what you think you should be getting anyways.   Many are finding this a scandalous way for Facebook to sneak in more revenues.  If you are interested in more details on promoted posts and how to use them for your business, check out 3 Strategies for Using Facebook’s Promoted Posts.

There you have it: the ways that Facebook has personally pissed me off.  How about you? Let us know in the comments how Facebook has posed challenges to your social media marketing efforts.

Comments, likes and tweets are always appreciated! Did I mention that I LOVE your feedback?

Image Source: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }

Simon Gabay August 22, 2012 at 4:31 pm

Its funny because I’ve noticed all these things bother me but I would subconsciously “sweep it under the rug” until I read your post and realized just how much Facebook really does piss me off :p

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Martina August 23, 2012 at 8:09 am

Haha 🙂 It’s all about being aware and adapting to the challenges Facebook poses. Thanks for stopping by Simon!

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