First-World Facebook Problems for your Regular Marketer

I thought long and hard on a topic that would be suitable for my first blog post in English terms of Social Media and I figured why not go with the easiest of choices, Facebook!

Most online marketing activities are related to Facebook, it’s the fastest growing social network with the biggest number of users by far in comparison with its competitors, and it has the most comprehensive system of promotion and advertising than anyone in the game.

The choice was easy. However, the topic wasn’t. What could I possibly write about that hasn’t been said over a million times. And then it hit me – it’s the first-world problems and shortcomings that generally piss people off, but most of us ignore them and find workarounds.

The first problem I constantly have is always related to posting links, especially if I’m using my smartphone. While surfing the web on my mobile browser I often come across interesting links that I want to share on some of my clients’ pages so naturally I hit the Facebook share button, and… whoops! You are only given an option to share with your friends and NOT on a page.

So it’s workaround ‘magic’ time. If you are using Chrome for Android like I am you can click the three vertical dots button to roll out the full menu and then share via Pages Manager. Problem number one – solved. Moving on.

While we are on the subject of shares it really bothers me that Facebook still hasn’t rolled out an option to put a scheduled post button when you share a link. Suppose you are on the move and see an awesome link, image or post that relates to a specific activity you are doing for one of the brands you manage but want to share it a couple of hours or days/weeks later? Well, no dice then!

If you are on your computer you can do it manually, but if you are on your mobile you are going to have to keep on pulling those rabbits from you hat. If it’s a link, one way to do it is to click on it on your Facebook app and then opening it in a browser, and finally sharing it via Pages Manager and scheduling the post.

If it’s a post or an image, then it gets a bit tricky, because you are going to have find a way to open it through a browser and do the abovementioned trick, but that’s not at all simple. Yeah, Facebook doesn’t give you access to URL of posts and images in its native app so good luck with that.

Another thing that definitely needs more work is the Pages Manager itself. Why you ask? For several reasons actually. Reason one – there is no ‘hide comment’ option in the app for those really offensive and annoying posts from trolls (you all know what I’m talking about). The second reason is that there is no option for changing the amount you want to spend on a boosted post, except for the default ones, which really sucks.

And last, but not least, probably the biggest pain for a Facebook marketer – the ‘no change image option’. We’ve all been there. You have a great design for a campaign, you launch it, it gets picked up fans and BOOM some wise guy saw that tiny little detail that no one really cares about, but there it is, it managed to slip in, and now you have a problem.

Now, I can see the dilemma here on behalf of Facebook as well that if someone liked one image it’s not cool to change it completely with something else and mislead your fans. But why not have a ‘submit an edited image’ option? Why can’t you edit text if post is boosted? Oh, the horror…