Tuesday, February 25, 2014

For Facebook administrators: Who posted *THAT* content?

Here's one for the Facebook administrators, and a cross-post of an article I wrote for my company's blog:

Earlier this month, Facebook announced a new feature intended to help Facebook Page administrators by displaying the name of each Page post and Page comment author. This notation helps those companies working in teams to manage their Page directly via Facebook. By knowing which Facebook user posted an item, teams can better identify which administrators are contributing which content. More importantly, this solves a nagging puzzle that has often plagued Facebook administrators in teams, in that some content could be posted behind the relative anonymity of Facebook page administration. The discussion would often start at an alarmed all-hands meeting where the predominant question was: Who posted *THAT* content?
Facebook has started rolling out this new feature over the past few days, and while Facebook Page administrators working in teams have generally welcomed this functionality and notation, there are several important things to note to understand and use the feature.
authorship via facebook
First, this notation is only visible to you and those other Facebook users who help manage your Page. The presence of an actual person’s name alongside a Page post has caused alarm among some administrators with concerns that their names are now linked and visible on a Facebook Page. Be assured that only the other administrators of the same page can see who posted content; your audience is not privy to this authorship information.
Second, if you use a third-party tool like Spredfast for publication, this feature is redundant and can be misleading.  If you are a Spredfast customer, you should continue to rely on the Spredfast platform to determine “true” authorship. Just like before, Spredfast customers can use the publishing calendar to determine who authored, modified and/or approved any Facebook content.

When viewing your Facebook Page posts natively, you will notice that all publications originating from Spredfast are attributed to the Facebook administrator who authenticated the Facebook Page to Spredfast. This may not necessarily be the Spredfast user who authored the content within Spredfast.
Authorship via Spredfast
While the rollout of authorship information for Page Admins will be a helpful tool for teams of administrators that manage their Page directly via Facebook, this should not interfere with how Spredfast customers track and manage post authorship directly within our Social Relationship Platform. Whether you publish natively or through a third party tool like Spredfast, know that only your fellow administrators can view this authorship information (and breath a sigh of relief!)
Armed with this knowledge, you can thoroughly understand and know where to look to learn “Who posted *THAT* content”.