Last week’s column about Facebook fan pages generated a few reader questions, and I wanted to field those before moving on to other subjects.
I spoke to a young man who considers himself an expert in the area of social media, to see if he’d be willing to answer some of these for me, and he kindly agreed to help out. He seemed troubled by the idea of my giving out advice on the subject, calling my working knowledge of social media and internet-related technical issues “pathetic.”
I tried to take that in stride, since I really agreed with him, even though I might have phrased it a little more subtly than he did (I would have preferred “somewhat pathetic”). I’m just happy to have some help, and this guy appears to be the ideal choice: he has thick glasses, a slightly stained Darth Vader T-shirt, and he doesn’t appear to have been outdoors since he was 12 (two years ago). He doesn’t actually know his name anymore, but he’s happy to answer to any of his user names, so we’ll just call him “gandolf1628.”
Question 1:
My bluegrass band, “Wyndy Breeze” has a Facebook fan page that receives messages, but now when I see the message alert, it’s for the messages from my personal profile. How can I access the band’s messages now? Somebody might be trying to book us or something. – Jerry B.
gandolf1628: That’s pretty easy: Just look on your band page, and scroll over to the “settings” tab, click on that, then hover over “general” until a set of choices appears, scroll down to “security,” click on that, then find “notifications,” hover over that for a few seconds until you see the option “message alerts,” click on that, then find “Admin message notifications” and unclick the box. Then click the box again. Then find “read messages in message field” and click that box, then unclick the box, then click it again. Then back up to the security settings within the “general menu,” click that and choose “Messaging,” then find the “response time” feature. Ignore it. Go back to the settings tab, but not the settings tab for your band page, the settings tab for your personal profile, find the box next to “gluten free” and check it. Then hit save (at the bottom, just under “Post Promotion” and “Post Partum”). Make sure to do all this as your personal profile and not as the administrator of your band page (in other words, your true self). I’d explain how to do that, but you wouldn’t understand.
Question 2:
I’m part of a progressive bluegrass band called “Cabbage Filter” and it seems that when we place a link to our web site in a post, it’s only seen by three people. We also can’t tag friends of ours. Can you help?
– Courtney Spink
gandolf1628: Well, it’s important to place the link in the post the way Facebook wants you to. Embedding it within a photograph or text is frowned upon, so it’s best to follow this simple procedure: Look for the dropdown menu at the corner of your message and hover over that (it’s best to momentarily look away while you do this, and count to 6), then choose the “options” option, from there you’ll have a choice to “add link.” Once you click on that, check the box that says “enable link pasting.” Then click on the little wheel (very similar to the one Ezekiel saw) and choose the “link options option” option, click that, and select “select.” Choose a link to copy, then go back to the previous “option” option, select “copy”, then paste using “control V” or by returning to the “link options” options, selecting “select” then choosing “paste.” This should paste your link with an image preview, and it should expand the reach of your post. Or maybe not. As for tagging friends, it’s a band page so you can’t.
I don’t know about you, but I tuned out after the second use of the word “hover,” and I’ve sent gandolf1628 on his way. His parting advice to me was that most of this will change next week when Facebook announces some major changes to the way pages are administered. Apparently there will be a lot more options. Oh good!
