Sendible Blog

Here is a handy tip that explains how you can upload a photo to Sendible and then convert it into a link preview to be posted onto Facebook or other social media sites:

1. Go to your Sendible Message Box, Click Photo or File and upload an image to Sendible.

2. Once uploaded, you’ll see your image with 3 little icons at the top right. Click the middle icon (a link).

3. You’ll be able to enter a URL and convert the image to a link preview.

These days, it’s harder than ever to get your updates noticed on Facebook. Due to the sheer volume of posts hitting the news feed, there’s a good chance that your updates will be missed or simply overlooked due to all the other noise. For this reason, it’s now more important than ever to make sure your updates are noticed and acted upon. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how with 6 simple tricks, you can increase your exposure on Facebook and generate more click-throughs to your website.

1. Attribution Links

Several social media management tools, such as Sendible.com, allow you to include attribution links along with your posts. These are little customizable links that appear below your updates and can contain any text you like. They can also link to any website you like. In the example below, we’ve included the link “Visit our blog” below the post.

2. Branded Facebook Posts

It is also possible to include your company name below every update you send to Facebook. So, instead of seeing “via mobile” or “via Sendible”, your posts could display “via My Company” with a little square icon alongside. This is a great way to build up your brand awareness and have Facebook users click on your company name and go directly to your website. The option for branded Facebook posts is currently a feature offered by Sendible.

3. Scheduling

To ensure the best possible chance of having your Facebook posts noticed, you should schedule your posts to be published at the time your fans are most likely to be looking at their Facebook news feed. There are various tools out there that make it easy to schedule your Facebook updates.

4. Link Previews

Another easy way to engage your Facebook fans is by creating interesting link previews. Link previews are made up of a thumbnail, title, caption and description. These details appear whenever you post a link to Facebook. Certain 3rd party social media management products, such as Sendible.com, make it easy to customize these details so that you can make your link previews more descriptive, resulting in better click-through rates.

5. Facebook Photo Albums

Another great way to gain more views and click-throughs, is by posting several photos to a new or existing Facebook Photo Album on your Facebook Page. Facebook Photo Albums are known to generate more click-throughs on a news feed and therefore, higher levels of engagement. You can use a social media dashboard to help you to schedule these Facebook Album posts ahead of time for maximum engagement. Here is an article from our blog that explains how to do this using Sendible.

6. Geotargeting

In Facebook, users disclose a lot of relevant information about themselves – for example their age, gender, location, work history, language etc. As a Facebook Page administrator, you have the ability to deliver content that’s only relevant to specific fans. Since you are targeting specific fans by location or language, you can customize your content to generate the most engagement for the subset of fans that are being targeted. Click here to see how easy it is to target specific fans using a third party social media management tool.

I recently read the following post implying that the levels of engagement on Facebook are reduced when using third party social media management tools. From our analysis, this is completely untrue and we have seen the exact opposite effect with users on our social media platform. By using third party applications, such as Sendible, for scheduling, geotargeting and branding their Facebook updates, brands are in fact seeing higher click-through rates, building better brand awareness and dramatically increasing their engagement ratio. To sign up for a free Sendible trial, visit http://sendible.com/signup.

I keep reading posts about how you shouldn’t post to Facebook using a 3rd party APIs because it kills your EdgeRank. Supposedly Facebook penalizes 3rd party APIs’ EdgeRank (the “secret sauce” that determines how often your Page’s updates show up in users’ news feeds) and collapses 3rd party API updates. While I’m sure that there’s merit to these arguments, I also don’t think writing off social media management systems (SMMS) is necessarily a good idea, or even an option for large companies or for agencies managing multiple brand accounts.

Benefits of using SMMS include:

• Ability for multiple people to post from one central dashboard.Yes, you can now have multiple Page admins on Facebook, but SMMSs offer the ability for multiple admins to manage posts in a more robust way than one-off posting directly to Facebook.
• Workflow tools–post scheduling, draft/approval modes, and ability to assign issues to certain admins are all valuable workflow tools.
• More robust moderation/blocklist capabilities–Facebook offers rudimentary moderation and profanity blocklist functionality, but for regulated industries like pharma, insurance or finance, more robust controls may be necessary.
• Post scheduling–yes, I know–social media is supposed to be real-time and not scheduled, but in reality, that’s not how a lot of businesses work. From needing to schedule posts to cover non-business hours to just needing a schedule to stay on top of posting, being able to view both upcoming and past posts via a calendar can be enormously beneficial. Managing social media accounts is a juggling act and whether you have one person managing all company social media accounts or a bunch of people managing one account, calendaring is, in my opinion, highly valuable.
• Data analysis and reports–Facebook’s Insights leave a lot to be desired in terms of data aggregation, engagement analysis, and activity reports. Yes, there are tools you can use to augment Facebook’s lackluster insights, but in my opinion they don’t compare to the functionality SMMSs offer. The ability to see the number of clicks per post, total reach and/or engagement combined with Twitter, Linkedin and blog posts, and other advanced metrics simply doesn’t exist using just Facebook’s insights.
• Unique features–I use Thrive as an SMMS and it offers a super cool feature–the ability to create a custom action link on posts without links. You know how, when you post to Facebook, “like,” “comment” and “share” links appear below the post? With Thrive you can add a customized action link such as “donate” with a link to your nonprofit’s donate page, or “shop” with a link to your company’s online store, “take action” with a link to your organization’s advocacy page–whatever action/landing page you want. I’m sorry but it’s just cool, and you can’t do it posting directly from Facebook.

So sure, there’s merit to the arguments that using a 3rd party app to Facebook could potentially affect your Page’s EdgeRank. However, when those arguments are coming from EdgeRank Checker–sorry, I’m skeptical. Especially when their argument against SMMSs include this:

“Posts that are scheduled typically struggle to have high engagement. This is most likely due to the nature of a scheduled update. It’s difficult to create unique engaging content several hours or days in advance. Any negative impacts of scheduled posts are most likely correlations with poorly developed content….Automated content typically performs horrendously, due to lacking human touch and craftsmanship. These types of updates struggle for engagement as is (even if they were manually posted onto Facebook). We highly advise against any automated content on Facebook.”

Sorry but that’s just BS, IMHO. You can think of updates off the top of your head and have them be crap, or you can schedule posts a month out, linking back to evergreen content on your website, that result in a ton of traffic back to your website. Obviously, there’s an element of “real time” to Facebook updates, but there are plenty of pages that achieve high engagement via posts that are created well ahead of time and scheduled. I don’t buy this argument at all–and my experience managing Facebook pages over the past 3 years bears out my skepticism. Content that is scheduled through a 3rd party API doesn’t mean that content is “automated”–it can be as carefully curated as content posted in real time directly to Facebook. The platform from which you post doesn’t dictate the quality of the content you’re posting.

What’s your experience been with posting directly to Facebook versus posting from a 3rd party API? Have you noticed a decline in engagement after switching to an SMMS? Or do you think this whole EdgeRank/3rd party API thing is overblown?

This post was kindly contributed to us by Maggie McGary. Visit her website for more great articles: http://www.mizzinformation.com

The Sendible Facebook auto responder allows you to automatically send Facebook wall posts to your contacts on their birthdays.  Businesses can use this social media tool as a marketing campaign, to send messages to their customers leading up to their birthdays.  These messages could be used to attract customers through the use of exclusive birthday coupon codes.

Follow the steps below to configure this on your Sendible account:

Step 1: Log into your Sendible Account.

Step 2: Go to Add/Edit Services.

Step 3: Go to Social Media Messaging and Click “Add” to include Facebook Wall Post.

Step 4: It will ask you to connect to your Facebook account. “Click” on connect with Facebook and enter your account details.

Step 5: Click on “Allow”.

Step 6: Click on “Grant the Permission” and then again click “Allow”.

Step 7: Click on “Fetch Contacts” and then select the contacts to be imported and to receive your automatic messages.

Step 8: Click on “Import”.

Now you will be brought back to Add/Edit Services and in there select the “Automation” tab. Then click the Add button next to the Facebook Auto Responder.

Step 9: Fill in the Details on the form and don’t forget to select an existing or if you don’t have one setup yet, then you can create one by clicking on the small group button next to the group dropdown menu as shown below.

Step 10: When you are done then click on “Save Settings” as shown below.

Your Facebook auto responder has now been set up and will automatically start scheduling birthday messages to your Facebook contacts.

With Sendible social media management software, you have full control over the link previews that you post to Facebook. A Facebook link preview is the thumbnail image and title, caption and description that appears below a link you post on Facebook.

You can use the following technique when attaching links – this will give you complete control over Facebook link previews:

1.  From Message Box > Compose, click the URL button.
2. Enter the URL (e.g. http://www.facebook.com/snowball.studios) and click Attach.
3. Select the image preview to use and click Attach Link Preview.
4. Then, you can edit the message content and click Send.

If you haven’t already done so, add your Facebook and Twitter accounts from within Add/Edit Services. Once you’ve added your social media accounts, you can schedule your posts to your saved services.

There are two ways to schedule your messages with Sendible.

Option 1:

The easiest way to schedule a message is as follows:

1. Select Message Box > Compose.

2. Compose your message.

3. Select the “Scheduling” button and select to Send at a specific time.

4. Select the exact date and time to send the message.

5. Click Send and Sendible will send the message at the scheduled time.

Option 2:

You can use the calendar as follows:

1. Select Message Box > Calendar.

2. Find the date and time you’d like to post and click that time slot.

3. Compose your message and click Send. Sendible will send the message at the scheduled time.

We are excited to announce the release of a new powerful piece of functionality exclusive to the Sendible platform. In fact, this has been one of the most frequently requested features and finally Facebook has made this possible via their API.

What is Geotargeting?

Geo targeting in geomarketing and social media marketing is the method of determining the geolocation (the physical location) of a website visitor and delivering different content to that visitor based on his or her location, such as country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code, organization etc.

How can I target specific fans within Facebook?

In Facebook, users disclose a lot of relevant information about themselves – for example their age, gender, location, work history, language etc. As a Facebook Page administrator, you have the ability to deliver content that’s only relevant to specific fans. For example, you may be promoting an event in Los Angeles and only want your promotion to be visible to your fans located near LA who speak a specific language.

An example of a targeted message could be:

“Free comedy tonight at the Spanish Comedy Club in downtown LA.”

And you could target this directly to all fans who are most likely to be engaged by it. For example all people in Los Angeles who speak Spanish.

How do I do this in Facebook?

In Facebook, you would select the Customize option just before you post your update to your fans. Here you can decide exactly which fans your post will be visible to.

How do I do this in Sendible?

In Sendible, when you first add your Facebook Fan Page in Add/Edit Services, you can define exactly who to target. To post to different fans, you can add the same Facebook Fan Page multiple times and just change the “geotargeting” options each time.

About Sendible

Sendible is a social media management platform that allows small businesses to reach customers on multiple social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and many more.

As many of you may have seen on Techcrunch today, Sendible helped discover a security flaw in Facebook’s API. We would just like to confirm that no user accounts were compromised and Sendible was not “hacked”.

The facts are as follows:

1. Sendible allows you to add Facebook Pages that you’re a fan of or that you admin.
2. You can use Sendible to post to these pages via Facebook’s API.
3. Usually, these posts appear as the Facebook user and not as the Facebook page itself.
4. In this case, one of our users sent an update to a few popular Facebook pages, assuming they would appear to come from his profile.
5. Instead, they were posted as if they came from the page itself.
6. This is a flaw in Facebook’s API and may affect all third party Facebook applications.
7. The technical cause of this problem is that when using the stream.publish call in the Facebook API and setting the Poster ID as the Page ID instead of the User ID, Facebook delivered the post as the fan page itself and not the user, even though the user was not a page admin.

This issue was discovered by one of our users and when contacting the user, this was his response:

i wanted to post only on a few facebook walls as a fan – and for some reason, posted as the page Owner.  Weird

To ensure this doesn’t happen again, we’ve agreed with Facebook to remove the feature on Sendible that allows fans of Facebook pages to update multiple pages at once.   Facebook has also agreed to release a patch by the end of the day so that no other Facebook applications will be affected.

A question that we’re frequently asked by our users, is “What’s the best way to post links to Facebook Pages using Sendible?”.

If you’d like to post an update to Facebook with the title, caption and image in Facebook’s native format, the best way to achieve this is as follows:

1. After adding the Facebook Page service from Add/Edit Services, return to the Message Box.
2. Select the Facebook Page you’d like to post to.
3. Click URL and enter the URL of the link you’ll be posting to Facebook.
4. Click “Load Images from URL” to find a suitable image on the page to act as your link preview and click “Attach to message”.
5. Now click, “Shrink and Insert” to insert the link into your message.
6. You can type any text you like, as long as your message contains a link. Sendible will extract the link for you automatically and post it to Facebook in its native format with the attached image acting as the link preview.

Sendible is social media management software that incorporates an email marketing platform used by individuals, agencies and small businesses. To get started, sign up for a free account at http://sendible.com/signup.

A popular feature on our social media management software, is the ability to import your Facebook contacts and send out wall posts in bulk to each of your friends’ walls.

The steps below show you how to import your Facebook contacts into a group and send out wall posts in bulk or individually.

Step 1: Import your contacts from Facebook

• To import your contacts from Facebook, go to Add/Edit Services and scroll down to the category, “Social Media Messaging”.
• Select the service “Facebook Wall Post” and click Add.
• You may be prompted to sign into Facebook. After signing in, you’ll be returned to Sendible.
• Click “Fetch Contacts” to load your friend list from Facebook.
• Select the contacts you wish to import by checking the boxes next to each name.
• You can also choose to add the contacts to a group. This makes things easier if you’re planning to post to multiple walls at once.
• Click “Import” to begin the import process.

Step 2: Send Facebook Wall Posts to your friends

• Once your contacts have been imported, Sendible will send you an email notification.
• You can check that your contacts are in your Sendible address book by going to “My Contacts”.
• To send a Facebook wall post, go into “Message Box”.
• In the services list, select the option “Social Network Message”.
• You’ll now be able to type the name of the group you created or the names of your friends’ Facebook Wall’s that you’ve imported.
• Separate multiple contacts and/or groups with commas.
• Click Send.