[[UPDATED October 13, 2016]]
One very helpful Facebook feature if you are a community manager is the ability to switch between your own profile and your page profile when posting and commenting on Facebook.
On your own page, you may want to post and comment as your page. But from time to time, you may want to reply to fans using your own profile. A response from a person rather than a brand can definitely help you look more real and human. That’s something I do very often, especially if I personally know the person I’m responding too!
[Tweet “Responding to fans using your personal profile is a great way to “humanize” your brand.”]
Before, it was an “all-or-nothing.” Facebook featured a blue bar on the top of the page allowing you to switch between your page or your personal profile for anything you would do on the page:
The new system is much more flexible.
Each post on your page has a small icon at the bottom right where you can immediately see the account you’re using to comment and, by clicking on it, you can switch accounts in a second. That drop-down is post specific, meaning that you may choose to comment for a specific post as yourself without affecting other actions you may take on the page.
In this example, our content director can choose to comment to this specific post as either Agorapulse or herself.
That’s really neat. With the old system, I kept switching to my account to reply to a comment, forgetting I had switched, then spend 10 minutes creating a post just to realize after it was published that I was still using the page “as me” and the post that took so long to draft would not go anywhere!
Facebook page management just got much easier!
The benefit of that new feature doesn’t stop there.
Actually, that little switch does not only appear on your page’s posts. It appears on any page’s post.
It allows you to comment or post on someone else’s page as yourself or as one of the pages you manage with just a simple switch.
With the old system, in order to comment on somebody’s page as one of your pages, you had to go through your settings menu and choose to “use Facebook as your page”:
Not only was that feature very well hidden, but it was also an “all-or-nothing” choice. Meaning that once you’ve switched to use Facebook as a page, everything you would do on Facebook would be as that page. You had to constantly switch back and forth between your page and your personal profile. Tedious.
With the new system, that is totally gone.
Instead, you’ll see a convenient your personal profile icon at the bottom right of each page’s post. Click on the drop down arrow to the right of your profile pic and choose the account you want to speak from for that particular post.
[Tweet “You can now comment on other Facebook pages as your page with a simple, convenient switch.”]
See the options our content director has now when she wants to say a little something to this Social Media Examiner post on social media advertising?
Why is this such a great new feature?
Liking and commenting as your page on other people’s page can be a great way to build awareness among your peers and build or strengthen relationships with brands or influencers you’d like to work with. This is probably one of the best ways to be on their radar without being intrusive with unsolicited messages they may not even see or respond to!
What do you think? Will you comment as your page more often with this new feature? Let us know in the comments!
