Five Free Facebook Tools to Enhance Your Social Media Campaign
We’ve talked a lot lately about Twitter tools and which out of the thousands available are the most useful in terms of Social Media campaign planning, execution and day-to-day profile management. With Facebook becoming increasingly useful for businesses, we thought it was about time we did a roundup of Facebook tools and how they can help you get more out of your professional Social Media activities.
Native Facebook Tools
Though they don’t tend to shout about them, some of the most handy Facebook tools are within Facebook itself…
Researching for Facebook Campaigns with Lexicon
A useful stats tool for Facebook, Lexicon gives you trending information on words and phrases used on people’s walls. For example, this graph shows how mentions of “red wine” in wall posts have slowly decreased in the last two years. This kind of information is useful when choosing which keywords to use in a Social Media campaign and indeed whether Facebook is the best platform for any given subject.
The new version of Lexicon, currently in preview mode, will also reveal a more detailed breakdown of keyword stats, such as how many people have used a term (as opposed to how many times the word or phrase has been used) as well as gender and age demographics.
Promoting Your Page/Event/Competition with Facebook Ads
The closed nature of Facebook makes it difficult to find and interact with people unless they are already your friends. One of the best and most time/cost effective way of shouting about your page and building followers is using Facebook Ads.
These can be highly targeted to people with relevant keywords in their profiles, or of a certain demographic. Easy to set up and manage, you can also set daily/weekly budgets for Facebook Ads and specify a maximum cost per click.
Discover How Well Your Facebook Page is Doing with Facebook Insights
Anyone who’s managing a Facebook Page should be all over Facebook Insights (accessible from within the Pages Admin section of your account). It’s another analytics tool that shows how your followings are developing and gives context for interactions on your Page, including wall posts, likes and comments. As Facebook explains it:
“ Your Post Quality shows you how engaging your posts are to your fans, and your star rating compares your Post Quality to other pages of similar size. Your Fans Over Time graph now lets you track when users decide to unsubscribe from your posts in their News Feed. And we now provide statistics on where your fan base is located and which languages they speak.”
External Facebook Tools
Keep Facebook Updated with Sendible
A cross platform scheduling tool, Sendible lets you queue up Facebook Page updates to release at a certain time (much in the way that Twuffer and HootSuite do for Twitter). If you are going to be away on holiday or too busy to update your Facebook Page, this is a great way to keep it populated with regular content – though of course should not be a replacement for daily interactions. It also works for Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plurk, Tumblr and Flickr among other services.
Monitor, Post and Schedule Facebook Activity from HootSuite
If you read my recent post about web-based Twitter client HootSuite, you’ll already know that I’m a big fan, especially since all the recent changes which integrated Facebook and LinkedIn. While some other Twitter clients now let you post to your personal Facebook profile and even Facebook Pages, HootSuite is the only one that also has an in-built scheduling tool which you can use to queue up future Facebook Page wall posts (as with Sendible). Unfortunately HootSuite has yet to incorporate Facebook posts into its link-tracking stats package – though I am sure this will come in time.
Facebook Pages on HootSuite
…and what they look like on Facebook
There are of course many other Facebook tools and apps out there, but these five make a good basic toolkit for beginners looking to enhance their Social Media marketing experience. We’re already planning a post on how to jazz up your Facebook Page, so watch this space for more Facebook tips coming soon…
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