How do customers get in touch?

How do your customers get in touch with you? What should you do to help them get in contact? Where should you be visible and how are people likely to message you? You might be surprised …

Be where your customers are

There’s a good general rule that you should be where your customers are. That means physically as well as virtually.

If people buy your type of thing at craft fairs and in shops, go to craft fairs and establish a presence in a few shops (many crafty shops will rent shelf space and/or take a commission. Take advice from other crafters on tips for choosing fairs – I have no idea about this myself)
If your clients hang out in Pinterest or Instagram, make sure you have an account there, you use it on-brand and wisely, and you put your contact details on your profile
Most people will do a web search when they’re looking for what you sell or provide – make sure you have a website, even if it’s just a landing page with contact, product and service details.
I strongly suggest you add a contact form to your website. Most blogging platforms and website services like WordPress will have contact form templates for you to use.
Many people will look on Facebook so make sure you have a Facebook page even if you don’t interact with it very much.
If you have a Twitter profile, again, get those contact details on it.
If you can’t help someone, try to pass them to someone who can.

How do customers contact me?

I’ve been observing how people have contacted me about genuine paid work opportunities over the past few months. Here are the ways they’ve done it:

Contact form on my website – this is the main way in which people contact me. It comes straight through to my email, with the person’s email, so I can reply straight back to them
Email – my email address is on my website, so I assume people pick it up from there, if they’re not a recommendation who has been given my email address by someone else
Twitter – a public @ message – so make sure your Twitter account is open and allows messages
Facebook – a question on my business page – make sure you enable alerts so you can see when these come through to you!
Facebook – a Facebook Messenger request – these can get lost in “Other” messages – check that folder regularly
Twitter – a direct message. This can only be sent by someone you mutually follow on Twitter but they still happen – watch out for alerts
Phone – I have a dedicated mobile phone with its number on my website. I receive very few phone calls and because I leave my phone on voicemail most of the time (because I do a lot of work where I really have to concentrate), people who leave messages tend to email me as well anyway.

Other ways people might contact you:

At networking events
Through any messaging facilities on other social media sites
By text message

The golden rules of social media contact

I’ve covered this in depth in an article about reciprocity but in general:

Always respond to people who contact you – it’s only polite
Take the conversation out of the public eye if it’s about prices and services
Always be super-polite, even if it seems like someone is trying to get at you
Do set expectations – if you’re not going to work weekends / late nights, maybe don’t reply to messages so quickly at the weekend or late at night, to set an expectation of office hours only (be prepared to make exceptions for a real jewel of a prospect, however!)

Summary: make yourself as available as you can; you never know where that lead will come from

Create yourself a website with a contact form as well as a list of contact details

Establish a presence on the very popular social media sites

Establish a presence on any social media sites that are relevant to your area of work

Always answer queries, taking them privately as soon as you can

Set expectations

If you can’t do a job for someone, try to recommend someone who can

In this article I’ve reminded you to keep as many avenues open as possible for people to contact you, and to follow that up by being responsive.

How do I get back to the full dashboard on WordPress.com?

18 Nov

I’ve been asked this question a few times recently, as WordPress has sought to make it easier for users to post a quick blog post or create a page. People who are familiar with the old, more detailed dashboard want to find it again. So here’s how.

How do I find the old dashboard on WordPress?

When you log on to WordPress, you will find a button marked My Sites. Click on that and you’ll get the new, simplified dashboard:

Now click on WP Admin, circled on the above image.

This will take you to the old familiar interface:

If this doesn’t work there is another tip, which is to add /wp-admin to the end of your page’s URL.

Note: this works for WordPress.com, the free version – self-hosted WordPress.org is a little different. If you’ve found this post useful, please do share it using the sharing buttons below.

Six things that you can do to increase your website or blog’s SEO (search engine optimisation)

29 Oct

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is one of those mysterious areas of knowledge – like setting up a website – that people like to keep to themselves. If you’ve been involved at all with a website or blog, you will know that people tend to almost prey on newbies, offering to increase their SEO if they work with this or that company.

The impetus for this post came from offering some help to a community organisation I’m helping out with. They don’t have the money to spend on expensive consultancy, so I’ve put together this guide for them – and you – to help clarify the myths and provide you with some advice to help you build good SEO.

What is SEO / search engine optimisation?

SEO means making sure that search engines like Google and Bing find your content and present it to people who are searching near the top of the results (just below the adverts).

Although they obviously work for a profit and want to make people advertise with them, the search engines do want to get reliable, decent and useful information to their users – otherwise those users will go elsewhere. They go to a lot of trouble to weed out spammy and dodgy sites that will put users off and don’t provide useful and relevant information (if every search you did on Google only gave you results on how to improve your SEO, when you wanted to know about Halloween outfits for dogs, you’d soon get bored and use a different search engine).

Therefore, we need to make sure our blogs and websites have the right information and content that will prove to Google that we’re legitimate sites full of useful content that it’s good to show their users.

There are various technical and writing related ways to do this and I’m going to cover the simple ones that you can do with, for example, a free WordPress.com website or blog and no coding skills.

I’ll note here that there are more detailed and technical things that you can do, to do with the coding of the actual site – this will however give you some simple tools that I’ve used to get good viewing figures and good SEO.

Why do I need SEO?

You want people to read your stuff, right? Well, although many people will find your content, services, products, etc. through social media, recommendations, blog readers, etc., the majority will find you through search engines.

Have a look at the statistics pictured. This was on a day when I published an article that was shared quite a lot on social media. Where did I get all my hits from? Search engines. So it’s really important to make sure that when people search for keywords to do with my blogs in the search engines, they find my blogs and find their way to me, so they can buy my services / be helped by my informative posts / buy my books.

How do I improve and maintain my SEO?

1. Publish useful, relevant, original and “natural” content

This is my number one top tip. The search engines are always looking for ways to stop people gaming the system and this is a clear example – we’ve all found websites which just have lists of keywords, etc.

I’ve got good results from the fact that the text on this site is useful, it’s relevant, as in it fits in to various categories and has information on those categories (Word, business, social media, etc.), it’s original (all written by me) and it’s written in natural language that looks like it’s been written by a human, not a robot or machine translator or spammer. This will always outweigh everything else.

2. Publish content regularly

Search engines like material that’s updated regularly, as it’s indicative that the site is still live and up to date. Try to post at least once, if not twice a week – it doesn’t have to be massive long articles, but something twice a week is better than five posts in one week then none for a month.

3. Use keywords wisely

There are some “rules” about the keywords that you want to use to attract readers. Here are the ones that have worked well for me, as far as I can tell:

Place the keyword / phrase in the title of the piece – so, here I have used “Increase your blog or website’s SEO” in the title.This automatically adds is to the “metadata”, in this case the URL of the piece. There is more you can do with metadata which is outside the range of this article.
Place it in an H1 or H2 level heading – here, I’ve used it in top-level headings.
Use it in the description of an image – the image above has the words “increase SEO” in the description field.
Use it early on in the text and in the final paragraph.
Scatter it throughout the text – but NATURALLY. A good aim is to have the keyword / phrase represent no more or less than 5% of the whole of the text (so if your text is 100 words long, you need the keyword to appear around five times.

4. Use questions in the title and headings

Many people search using questions these days – have a look at your statistics if you can and see how many question phrases appear.

So, use questions in your title (this one doesn’t have a question, but many of my blog posts do), and in your headings. These may well echo the exact phrases that people use to search, boosting you higher in the results.

5. Use categories and tags or whatever your blogging platform offers

Categories, tags, whatever your blogging platform calls them, will be searched by search engines, increase the validity of your site and improve your SEO. Use them wisely, using general (reading, writing) and specific (WordPress, copyediting) ones to help your visibility and to help your readers navigate around your site and stay on the site for a longer time.

6. Make judicious and careful use of backlinks

Search engines like to know that a site is reputable and well-respected by peers. Therefore, they put a high premium on the sites that link into your website or blog (i.e. they include your URL / website address on their own site). Of course, a good way to build these is to reference other well-known and well-respected blogs and websites on yours.

However, this is a tricky area that is used very heavily by spammers, too. So here are some dos and don’ts:

Do:

Place guest posts on other people’s blogs that are relevant and useful to both your audiences. You should be given the opportunity to include a link back to your website.
Offer people in your industry guest posts on your blog (or run interviews with them, etc.) and ask them to link back to the piece on their social media and website.
Get yourself in well-renowned and useful / appropriate listings – for example I’m in a Find a Proofreader listing and one for a professional discussion list I belong to.
Carefully comment on relevant articles and blog posts, with a relevant and useful comment. As an example of another blog, I comment on book bloggers’ review posts if I’ve read the book or have something to say about the book they’ve read, and include the URL of my own book review blog in the URL field. That way, a network of links builds up.
Use whatever reblogging facility you have on your platform (WordPress has a reblog button) to share interesting and relevant content on your blog (I don’t do this myself, but I’ve been reblogged a lot). This will publish a snippet of your blog and a link on the reblogger’s own page and direct readers to you and reassure the search engines that your content is useful.
Publicise your blog posts on social media (you can do this automatically) to increase the number of places your web address will appear.

Don’t:

Randomly ask to place guest posts on unconnected blogs – you might well get accepted but it’s not going to do you much good long-term.
Accept random and unconnected pieces to place on your blog, even if they say they’ll pay you – it’s not worth it long-term, as your readership will suspect it and anyone visiting your website for Dallas real estate and finding the rest of your articles are about crocheting will not stick around.
Put random comments full of your own links on people’s blogs that are not in any way connected with yours. Again, some might let these through (I delete any comments like this on my blogs) but it’s not going to look great, as many people will spot what you’re doing and it’s artificial, not natural, so may well harm you in the future.
Copy other people’s blog posts wholesale and paste them onto your site – search engines take a dim view of exactly duplicated content and will tend to push both examples right down the results screen. If you want to share something, share a snippet and a link to the rest of the content on the site where it was originally posted
Sign up with a company that offers to increase your SEO without checking very carefully whether they do this kind of thing – many of the rogue random comments and links I get on here obviously come from third parties unscrupulously throwing their customer’s URL all over the Internet

These dos and don’ts are to do with being decent, honourable and ethical. I’ve done it this way, and my blog is pretty successful. I will probably write about this in greater depth, but this should help as a handy guide.

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OK, that’s six things that you can do with your next blog post to help improve your website or blog’s SEO or search engine optimisation. This article itself has been optimised following my rules, and I hope you can pick out what I’ve done now. Do let me know if you have questions or comments using the comments option below, and please share using the share buttons if you’ve found this post useful.

How do I delete a Facebook group?

08 Jul

In this post we’re going to learn how to delete a Facebook Group. It’s the only way, and seems a bit weird to me – I spent ages looking for buttons to press and options to choose before finding out! So hopefully you will have found this article easily and I can help you do it more quickly!

For more basic information about using Facebook, see my article on Facebook for business.

Why might I want to delete a Facebook group?

The reason I wanted to do this is that I had a group based around a general election that there was no point keeping up with now. There are lots of reasons why you might want to delete a group, though – it might have got out of hand, you might not have time to run it, it might be time-dependent and out of date, like my one was.

If it’s a matter of not having enough time, consider making someone else the Admin for the group – you can see how to do that later on in this post, as well.

Note, you do have to be the owner or administrator of the group to delete it.

How do I delete a Facebook group?

To delete a Facebook group, you need to remove all of the members, then yourself. This makes the group go away.

In your group, locate its Members area:

Click on the Members link and here you are with your list of members:

For each member, click on the cog under the member’s name and click Remove from Group. Note that this is where you can make them an Admin instead.

Facebook will ask you to confirm.

Do this for each member of the group.

Lastly, remove yourself from the group in the same way. You will get this confirmation message:

This is the same error message whether you’re just leaving the group or you’re the last to leave – just choose Leave Group.

The group should now disappear. If it doesn’t, your best bet is to contact Facebook. Click on the arrow marked here:

… and select Report a Problem from the dropdown.

If you’ve enjoyed this post and found it useful, please share it using the buttons below! Thank you!

You can find more resources on social media in my blog resource guide (link takes you to the social media section) and read about using social media for your business in my book on growing your business.

How do I remove a member from a Facebook group?

02 Jul

In this post we’re going to learn how to remove a member from a Facebook Group. For more basic information about using Facebook, see my article on Facebook for business.

Why might I want to remove someone from my Facebook group?

The most common reason is that they have been spamming your group or behaving in another way that’s not acceptable.

Sometimes, a group member might not be sure how to leave a group and might ask you to remove them.

How do I remove someone from my Facebook group?

Go into your group and look for the Members area:

Click on the Members link to get into the Members area:

Click on the cog under the member’s name and choose Remove from Group.

Facebook will ask you to confirm. At this point, as you can see, you can also block them from joining or posting to the group again:

And they’ve gone!

If you’ve enjoyed this post and found it useful, please share it using the buttons below! Thank you!

You can find more resources on social media in my blog resource guide (link takes you to the social media section) and read about using social media for your business in my book on growing your business.

My business books are now available in print editions!

01 Apr

In case you’re not following my books blog but are interested in the books on starting and growing a business and specific aspects of business such as networking, social media and transcription as a career (and on lowering your cholesterol, that popular outlier to my oeuvre), I’m pleased to announce that all of my books are now available in print as well as e-book editions. Look – proof:

You can read all about what I’ve been up to in this blog post.

I’ll be sharing a how-to on creating your print book in Amazon’s CreateSpace and I’ll let followers of this blog know when that happens.

6 Comments

Posted by Liz Dexter on April 1, 2015 in Business, Social media, Transcription

Tags: business, social media, Transcription

MailChimp 1 – Signing up for MailChimp

11 Feb

Welcome to the first in a series of walk-throughs that will show you how to set up a MailChimp account, set up templates and lists, and send out a MailChimp newsletter. You can start to set up your subscriber list in MailChimp 2 and create a sign-up form in MailChimp 3 …

What is MailChimp?

MailChimp is a web-based service which allows you to send out newsletters to a list of people who have signed up to receive them. There are other services out there, but MailChimp is very popular, often recommended to newbies and is free as long as you have under 2,000 subscribers and send out fewer than 12,000 emails per month. You can upgrade in order to get extra features and also if your list goes over the 2,000 mark. Please note right here and now that I’m not being sponsored by MailChimp for doing these posts – I’ve been asked to do them by people I’ve been working with at social media training sessions, and I happen to use MailChimp myself so can give you all some training resources. Other similar services include iContact, Constant Contact and Aweber and you might want to check these out before committing to MailChimp.

Why use a special program? Why not just send out emails?

That’s a good point: if you have a load of emails to send out, why not, you know, just email them? Here are a few reasons:

It’s really, really easy to cc instead of bcc when you send out a mass email. CC is the one where everyone can see the email address of everyone the email’s been sent to. People get really annoyed when that happens.
Internet service providers can get really suspicious if you’re sending out regular emails to hundreds of people – or if one of their clients receives such emails. Your newsletter is likely to bounce into a spam folder and your own ISP might block you from sending them.
There are rules on spamming and using people’s email addresses to market to them without permission. The key is to allow people to opt in rather than assume they are to opt out. Services like MailChimp look after this, making sure people opt in to your mailings properly and that your details are on your emails. So you can be reassured that you’re not doing anything inappropriate.
It’s really easy to design nice newsletters, include photos and all sorts when using a service like MailChimp.

How do I sign up to MailChimp?

In this post, we’re going to walk through exactly how to sign up to MailChimp. In future posts, we’ll look at more detail of templates, getting people onto your list, etc. But here are the stages of signing up:

First of all, go to www.mailchimp.com, where you will find a button marked Sign Up. Hit that button:

This will take you to a screen where you can sign up for your first, free account. At this point, you need to enter your email address and create a username and password:

Note, because it’s not that clear, that your password must tick all the boxes below the password entry area. Here I’ve missed out on “one special character”, so I had to add an exclamation mark to my password:

At this point, the Create my Account button stops being greyed out and you can press the button. Now you’ll be asked to validate your account …

At this point, you need to pop over to the email account that you gave in the sign-up step. The email from MailChimp will obviously be from them and will have a subject line that talks about validating your account. When you open the email, it will look like this:

Click on the button and you’ll go through an initial validation stage …

Pop the number in, press the Confirm signup button, and you’ll then have a form to fill in.

Fill in as much of this form as you can. The address details are so that MailChimp can include them at the bottom of your newsletters. This is good practice and it’s a legal requirement in many countries to include this information on emails. However, if you run your business from a private address, as I do, I think it’s fine to smooth over the details a little and, for example, not include your house number. I am not a lawyer, though, and you might wish to check the legal requirements in your country.

You can add a profile photo at this point, if you wish.

Once you press the Save and Get Started button, you will find yourself in the main MailChimp screen, from which you can create templates, an email list or a campaign (i.e. an actual newsletter). This is also the screen you will encounter when you go to the website and log in rather than signing up.

So here you are, all signed up and ready to go.

Coming soon – articles on creating a newsletter template, adding sign-up forms, and sending out your campaign …

You can find a growing set of articles on blogging, social media MailChimp etc. in my resource guide. Do click on the share buttons below or comment if you found this article interesting or useful!

New book on networking, social media and social capital

04 Nov

I’m delighted to be able to announce that my new book, “Quick Guide to Networking, social Media and Social Capital” is out now and available to buy on Amazon and Smashwords as an e-book in all formats (for Kindle, Kobo, as a pdf …). Like my popular “Quick Guide to your Career in Transcription“, this contains the specific information – no filler, where there’s jargon, it’s explained – that you need to venture into networking, whether that’s face to face or through online services such as Twitter and Facebook. It pulls together material I’ve written and thought about on social media etiquette and building social capital … to help others as well as ourselves, and where I go into detail on particular topics, I provide links back to this blog for all of those screen shots and details that regular readers will be used to.

You can visit the book’s web page which lists all of the places you can buy it, and I have shared the first great reviews today, too.

I hope you enjoy reading about my new book and if you find it helpful or think one of your colleagues or friends would benefit from reading it, please let them know by sharing this post or the web page for “Quick Guide to Networking, Social Media and Social Capital“.

Google+ for business

22 Oct

In this article I’m going to go through how to set up a business page on Google+

Because I don’t want to show my home address in public on Google, or give it to Google, most of the examples here are drawn from setting up a Brand. However, I understand that the principles are the same if you’re setting up a local business with an address. Do get in touch if you’d like to share screen prints from setting up an account with an address and I’ll be happy to include them (but not tell everyone where you live!)

Why should I set up a Google+ account and page?

This is a good question, as Google+ is known to be one of the rather less active social media platforms. However, the clue is in the word “Google”. Basically, stuff you post on Google+ and your Google+ page will be indexed more quickly by Google and will appear as more relevant in a Google search. There are active communities in Google+ and Hangouts and other social discussions and groupings – I have to admit that what I personally do is auto-post to Google from this blog and my others, so invest minimal effort, but it is worth doing for the indexing and SEO side alone.

How do I set up a Google+ account?

If you have a Google email address, you will automatically have a Google+ account. Look at the top of your email and you’ll see a +[your name] icon …

You do need to have a Google account to have a Google+ account, although of course you don’t need to use it for anything else. Notifications about Google+ interactions come to your Gmail, but you could set up an autoforward to send that to another email account. Anyway, enough about options for escaping being taken over by Google – click on the +[name] icon and you’ll be taken to your Google+ account:

You can see that this looks quite a lot like other social media platforms such as Facebook, with posts by friends, recommended contacts (names deleted for privacy purposes) and a place to post an update at the top.

We’re not going to explore personal G+ at the moment, but instead look at the business application.

How do I set up a Google+ page for my business?

To access the Google+ pages creator and editor, click on the Home button at top left and choose Pages:

This will lead you to an option to choose a business type:

Clicking on Storefront or Service Area (which is what I chose when I first did this) will first give you an option to search for a business. This gets a bit confusing, but we’ll work our way through it. If you choose Create New Page, as you would expect to do, after clicking Not a Local Business …

you will get the option to add a business with a street address. This is great if you have a shop or trading address, for example if you welcome people into a high street shop, have a gym in an out-of-town location or have customers visit your home to collect products, have therapeutic sessions, etc., and if this is the case, you can fill in all the details and have a listing for your business appear on Google maps for prospective customers to see.

Here’s what a business with a local page looks like on Google Maps. Here, I’ve searched in Google Maps for the business name, but it will also appear if you are viewing the map of the area at a certain level of zoom:

(thanks to Alison from Silicon Bullet for letting me use her business as an example!)

But what if I don’t want to list my address and have a pin on Google Maps?

I don’t want to list my address on Google Maps because I work from home, but I don’t see any clients here and I don’t really want the world to know my address! So this is how to set up a Google+ page without your address. Note, you can’t cheat the section above and put in spaces or dots – it really does want to pinpoint your address with a little label.

When you’re at the point of choosing your business type, choose Brand if you don’t want to have to add your address:

This will take you to a screen where you start to add your details:

You can now start filling in your details:

You can add in your URL and select the type of thing you’re talking about – so this is how you set up a community or other non-business entity, too.

Do note that you need to tick the box to agree to the Pages Terms (and do click through to have a look and check you DO agree) and to confirm that you’re authorised to create the page.Then click Create Page to create your page:

Once you’ve created your page, Google+ will give you a tour or you can just get started customising your page.

This is all pretty self-explanatory. For example, you will be asked to complete your profile and given options to share updates. There’s also a section where you can see Insights – how people are interacting with your new page.

You can update your cover with your own image as well as adding your own picture to the place on the left:

Once you’ve clicked Change cover, you can choose one of the gallery or upload your own photo (if you have already put up several cover photos, you can click on that link to choose one you’ve used earlier).

Upload takes you into your own folders so you can choose your own image. Here I’ve added my own image and I can now explore, add updates and add contact information and links.

How do I edit my Google+ business page(s)?

You can access your business pages at any time by clicking the Home button and choosing Pages. If you’ve created more than one Page, you will be shown all the ones you have active, with a link to edit them:

The Golden Rules of Google+

The rules here are the same as everywhere on social media …

Be professional
Reciprocate and share

In this post, we’ve learned about Google+ pages and how and why to create them. To learn about more aspects of social media for business, take a look at the resource guide.

if you’ve enjoyed reading this article and have found it useful, please take a moment to click on the buttons below to share it! Thank you!

Other relevant posts on this blog:

Facebook for business

How to delete posts and block users from your Facebook page

How to add a moderator or admin to your Facebook page

How to find a job using Twitter

Using Twitter for your business

Using LinkedIn for your business

Additional resource:

Garrett and Mike from Techfunction Magazine have got in touch to let me know about their resource guide to Google Business – read the first article here.

1 Comment

Posted by Liz Dexter on October 22, 2014 in Business, Social media

Tags: business, SEO, social media

How do I delete a post or ban a user on a Facebook page?

13 Oct

This post follows on from my one about the basics of Facebook for business and covers two really common concerns for people with a business Facebook page:

How do I delete a post or comment that someone has put on my Facebook page?
How do I ban or block someone from commenting on my Facebook page?

In fact, the way to do the second leads on from the first … so let’s look at how to delete a comment first.

Where can I see other people’s comments on my Facebook page?

Comments move around a bit on Facebook, but if you’ve enabled people to be able to comment, you can see their comments under the heading Posts to Page:

To look at all of these posts in detail or delete some, click on the arrow at the top right. You will then see just your comments:

To delete this post OR to block or ban the user, click on the down arrow at the top right. You will now be presented with three options:

Hide from Page will hide the post but not delete it – no one will be able to see it. This would be useful if you suspected someone of posting inappropriately but wanted to get in touch with them to check what they meant or give them another chance / ask them to edit their post. You also have the option to ban the user at this point:

(use Undo to backtrack from here, the x button to hide and close the dialogue box, or Ban User to ban the user from the page)

Delete from Page will delete the post and give you the option to ban the person who wrote the post

You can Delete the post and ban the user, Cancel if you clicked this option by mistake, or just Delete the post (you could use this option if the user had made a mistake or posted something you didn’t want on the page but you don’t actually want to ban that person from posting on your page in future.

Embed Post will generate some HTML code that will allow you to include an image of the post on Facebook in other places such as your website or blog – useful if you have a great post from a fan or celebrity:

Copy the code that’s highlighted and use it anywhere that you can place HTML – in a blog post, on a website, in a discussion forum, etc.

How do I block someone from posting on my business’s Facebook page?

As we’ve seen above, you can use two methods: both need you to look at the post itself first. You can then …

Hide the post and ban the user
Delete the post and ban the user

How do I stop people posting on my Facebook page at all?

If you want to suppress all posts from people who are not the Facebook page’s administrators / moderators, go to Settings / General / Posting Ability. When you go to the General area, under Posting Ability you will see your current settings. If you want to change these, click Edit:

Clicking Edit will allow you to choose whether and what people can post on your business page:

Use the round buttons to choose whether you Allow other people to post to my Page timeline or Disable posts by other people on my Page timeline. The tick boxes allow you to choose whether to let people add videos or photos (useful to untick if people have been posting inappropriate photos but you still want to allow comments) and allow you to ask Facebook to send you posts by other people that you then have to approve (you’ll receive an email alerting you to the new post and allowing you to approve or reject it).

Click Save Changes to save your changes or Cancel if you want to keep your settings as they are.

Important information about allowing posting and deleting posts

I personally think it’s a good idea to allow other people to post on your business Facebook page. After all, you want to encourage interaction and conversations, not just pump out sales information, right? I get a bit frustrated if I go onto the Facebook page for a business and find I can’t place a comment about how much I loved their veggie sausages or enjoy wearing my new shoes. So, unless you are bombarded with spam and abuse, try not to use the Disable posts by other people on my timeline option if it all possible.

And a word on deleting posts. Be careful what you delete.

Posts it’s OK to delete or hide

Unfounded or personal abuse
Spam that has nothing to do with your own page (e.g. on this Empedia page for an IT consultant, a post about buying homes in West Texas)
Spam from rival companies in your business area who are not supporting and cooperating with you, but merely trying to get your followers to move over to them instead (for example, on my own editing page, posts from student proofreading companies just saying “For the best proofreading click here”)
Pornographic or other inappropriate images, text or video

Posts it’s best not to delete or hide

Genuine complaints and negative feedback – OK, so your first reaction will be to hide that post where someone complains the shoe they bought from your range has fallen apart. But if they’ve taken the time to find your Facebook page and complain, then they’re going to know they did that, and they’re going to notice if you delete it. What will they do then? At very least, post it again, but be assured that they will have told their friends and family, shared your page on their Facebook timeline with a note about what you’ve done, and been very unhappy altogether.

If someone posts a complaint or negative feedback on your Facebook page …

Think what you’d do if you encountered them in person. You wouldn’t stick a bit of tape over their mouth or turn your back on them, would you? Yet that’s what you’re doing when you hide or delete their post.
Address the issue at least partly in public – for example, you could post a reply along the lines of, “Sorry to read you’re experiencing problems. Please contact me at vvv@vvvvv.com or via my Contact Page [with link] so we can resolve your problem”.
You could go further and say something like, “I’m sorry you appear to be having a problem – you can of course return your shoes to use for a full refund” and give them information on how to do this.
Once the problem is resolved, pop another reply on – “I’m glad we were able to replace your shoes and hope you’re happy with the new pair – do let us know how you’re getting on.
Be polite – if someone posts a little aggressively – “I’ve heard you supply slip-on shoes with fancy chains and blood diamonds on them to arms dealers: what do you say about that?” then take the polite route, and address their question in public as far as you can.
Don’t get into a fight in public – if it gets messy, take it offline with an offer to call them or whatever’s appropriate.
If the poster strays into the inappropriate, follow the steps above for deleting or hiding posts, but maybe consider putting a note on the page to explain (calmly) why you did this.

This article has hopefully helped you to deal with negative or inappropriate comments and commentators on your Facebook page. You now know how to hide or delete comments and block or ban users from your Facebook business page, and how to use the Settings to control who can post what.

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