To Facebook, or not to Facebook?
By: Jade Delios Callanan
Tags: Community Management, Social Media, Community Engagement, Social Media Management, Facebook

While many organisations in the social change sector use social media and use it well, many avoid it simply because they’re worried about how to manage it.

Starting a Facebook page can seem daunting. Do you have to reply immediately to every comment or message? Do you have to reply to everyone? Should you delete comments? Should you block someone?

The answer to these questions in most circumstances is ‘No’.

Having a Facebook page for your organisation gives you another channel to reach supporters, drive donations and secure volunteers. It’s also easy to set up and run.

The trick is to manage it well, and that’s all about starting on the right foot. By setting out the rules and expectations around your community, you’ll set yourself up to succeed.

Before you start posting, draft up some Community Guidelines for your page. This will clearly outline conduct that is unacceptable and won’t be tolerated for users interacting on your page, clearly stating if they break the rules they could be moderated or banned from the page.

When you’re writing up your Community Guidelines think of the things you are most concerned about people commenting and integrate these into your guidelines.

Think HQ recently assisted the Australian Financial Complaints Authority to set up and manage their social channels in the lead up to their launch. You can check out their Community Guidelines on their Facebook page.

The Community Guidelines also outline the hours in which your page is monitored. For example, if you say you will be monitoring your page from 9am-5pm, Mon-Fri, then that’s when you will be available to reply to people. If they comment or message outside of these times you can respond whenever you’re next back during monitoring hours.

These Community Guidelines become your go to. If someone behaves poorly, give them a warning, if they do it again you can block them without it being an issue because you have these rules in place.

When it comes to replying to comments and messages, a good place to start is putting together some standard responses to the most common questions or comments you might receive. These will be mapped to your organisation and what you do, but an example could be what to say if someone is not happy with your services.

Once you have these drafted you can then apply them to nearly all comments and messages you recieve, adapting them as needed. Your goal is to create answers that are clear, friendly and professional.

Pre-prepared answers can be customised, but having a starting point allows you to react quickly. Your social media followers expect a conversation, so it’s important to honour that.

Social media as a conversation is an important aspect when deciding whether to delete negative comments.

From the below comments, taken from a campaign trialing a 30km/h speed limit, which ones would you reply to and which would you delete?

What about this one, received during the AFCA launch?

Trick question — I wouldn’t delete any of these. While they’re all comments from people who are either all annoyed or unhappy, they provide an opportunity for you to reply and start a discussion about why they’re upset. It also shows other people on your page that you are responsive and attentive to your audience. Addressing negative comments is actually a key way of showing other people what you stand for and why.

Deleting comments, on the other hand, makes people think you’re hiding something or unwilling to address concerns.

Some comments can be deleted without worry — anything that’s overtly abusive, racists, sexist or a personal attack on you or another member of the audience should be removed because we want to create an environment where people feel safe and welcome. You can signal your intent to do this in the Group guidelines.

It won’t be easy at first, but by setting up your frameworks and from monitoring over time, you’ll get the hang of identifying how to handle different types of comments and messages, and confidently reap the rewards of social media.

Want to set up a Facebook page for your organisation? View the Lumin course on Setting up a Facebook page to get started.

Jade Delios Callanan is an Account Coordinator at Think HQ. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.