Although there’s a lot to consider when growing a successful Facebook page, the rewards of brand exposure, loyal fans and increased revenue are well worth your time and effort!

One way to streamline the time and resources that you put into your Facebook page is to assign a community manager. A community manager is an admin of your page who is responsible for managing the page and making sure it’s running smoothly. If you have multiple admins on your page, the community manager is ultimately responsible for managing them as well.

Most small to large businesses that have a Facebook page should consider assigning a community manager. The community manager should be aware of the company’s Facebook marketing plan and be well-qualified to execute that plan on a daily basis on your page.

A good community manager is key to building a strong community.

To help you find the right fit for your page, below are three tips to guide your decision.

Tip #1: Personality Counts

When looking for the right community manager for your page, you want to make sure his/her personality is a good fit for your audience. Here are six personality traits of a superstar community manager:

• Natural communicator
• Problem solver
• Enjoys people
• Good listener
• Professional
• Positive attitude and enthusiastic

Tip #2: Know Your Audience

You need a community manager who can connect with your audience.

Also consider your ideal audience and make sure your community manager is comfortable connecting with your audience and is able to build rapport with them easily.

Remember, Facebook marketing is about connecting and building relationships with real people, not brands. Choose a community manager who is a great representative for your company’s mission.

Tip #3: Evaluate Skill Set

You need a community manager with the right skill set.

In addition to personality traits, there are also some necessary skills that you want to make sure your community manager possesses. They are:

• Solid understanding of social networking
• Social media savvy
• Infallibly committed to helping people in social channels
• Ability to multi-task and think quickly
• Understands online marketing
• Ability to grasp how social media activity aligns with business goals

Questions to Ask Before Assigning a Community Manager

To help you make the right decision, here are some important questions you want to ask before you make your final hiring decision for a community manager:

• Does this person show the ability to be social online?
• Does this person show a genuine interest in connecting with our clients/customers?
• Can I trust this person to be professional and respectful at all times?
• Do people naturally gravitate toward this person?
• Will this person actively contribute new ideas to grow the page and make it better each day?

Because your community manager will be interacting with your fans daily, it’s paramount that you take the time to choose this person wisely. More often than not, you’ll find this person already on your internal team because they know your brand and your clients better than an outside source. However, this is not always possible and if you do need to hire an outside source make sure you train him or her well and monitor activity closely, especially in the first few months.

Expanding Your Facebook Marketing Team

In addition to assigning a community manager, it’s also wise to assign multiple admins to your page. Having a few admins manage your page is one way to optimize time and effort. Putting together an admin team is a smart strategy because your admins can divide and conquer.

With multiple admins, your community manager can assign roles and responsibilities that are aligned with the admins’ skills and strengths and your page will be more consistently managed with multiple people watching over the day-to-day activity. For the Social Media Examiner Facebook page, we have three admins. This allows us to keep engagement high and support our fans impeccably by responding to their posts and answering their questions.

To add an admin to your page, just go to the “Edit Page” link under your profile image on your Facebook wall. Once inside your Facebook page dashboard, click “Manage Admins” and you can type a name or email to add an admin to your page.

Once you're inside your Facebook page dashboard, you'll have the option to add (or remove) admins.

Any admins of your page have the ability to do the following:

• Admins can post status updates on your wall as the page’s identity, not the admins’ profile identity. What this means is that when you’re an admin of a page, you can only post as that page, and never as your own profile. To post on the company’s Facebook page as your own personal profile, you would need to remove yourself as an admin first.
• All admins can edit the page. This means that admins can add photos and videos, change out the profile image, remove posts, and add new tabs.
• Any admin of your page can add or delete admins. Due to this function, it is essential that you can trust all admins of your page to act respectfully and with integrity.

There is no way to limit the admins’ access and functionality on your page. This means that when you add an admin, it’s all or nothing. Make sure to choose your admins wisely!

Your community manager will want to make sure to assign each admin clear tasks so there’s no overlap or confusion on your page. The best way to do this is to create a set of rules and guidelines for your page to make sure everyone is clear on the expectations.

Here are some guidelines to consider as you coordinate posts and strategies:

#1: Decide how you want your admins to post on your page

Here are some questions you want to ask about your status updates and posts on your wall:

• How often will you post updates to your page?
• What will you post about?
• When will you use text-only versus links?
• Will you use third-party content to add value?
• Will you mix up the media and use video, audio, photos?

#2: Determine a communication strategy

There’s a fine balance between monitoring your page and allowing your fans to interact with each other and come to their own conclusions with questions or feedback you might ask from your posts. Decide how your admins should manage this important balance.

#3: Assign roles and document them

One admin might be responsible for posting one third-party article a day while another admin may be assigned the task of uploading company videos throughout the week. Other tasks might include posting questions, uploading company photos to a photo album, monitoring and responding to all fan posts or posting on fans’ pages to increase overall engagement. Whatever the task, make sure your admins are clear on their duties so there’s no confusion as you get going.

#4: Create guidelines

Every Facebook page should have a “dos and don’ts” list. Make it very clear what’s allowed and what you won’t tolerate on your page. Include what can and can’t be discussed, including company-related content and personal content. Decide how often you’ll promote your programs and services and what acceptable promotion looks like.

Think about your company, your mission and your goals and carefully craft your guidelines around all three. The time spent here will save you a lot of headache in the future!

Facebook continues to grow quickly and smart marketers are continually finding ways to use this platform as a new way to engage with their prospects and create stronger relationships. Consider putting together a Facebook team to optimize your Facebook marketing strategy.

Now it’s your turn! I would love to hear your thoughts on how your company manages your Facebook page, so feel free to share your ideas or add a comment in the box below.

All photos from Shutterstock

However, just because anyone can set up a blog, doesn’t mean everyone should, and many professionals and businesses start blogging without giving any thought to why, how and who will be doing the blogging.

Over 50 percent of blogs are abandoned within the first 90 days. While this isn’t really important if you’re writing a personal diary, political or celebrity blog, it is very important if you start a blog for your business and don’t keep posting on it consistently and with purpose.

When a prospect lands on a blog that hasn’t been updated in months, it’s akin to walking into a vacant store with busted windows and dust blowing in. It’s just not pretty; and it doesn’t look good for you, your business reputation and your branding.

Don’t let that happen to you. Start right, start smart and follow a few suggested guidelines. First, let’s review some basics:

What Is a Business Blog?

Because a blog is an inexpensive, fast way to build an online presence, it is an ideal way for business entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants, speakers, authors and other professionals to establish their credibility and expertise.  Since your readers can post comments, you create a conversation with your audience and build rapport and trust as a result.

The very nature of a blog is perfect for the busy professional.  They are quick and easy to update.  You are creating fresh content frequently (two to three times a week is recommended minimum) that is useful to your prospects and customers and loved by search engines.  In contrast to “traditional” static website, a blog is a dynamic site that encourages your visitors to interact with you through commenting so they can get to know you better.

When you create a conversation with your audience (visitors, readers, prospects), you are establishing your credibility.  You build your network and increase the visibility of your products and services in a casual way.

A blog is an essential tool in the professional’s marketing toolbox.  Combined with a website, an ezine, database management and ecommerce system, you will have everything you need to develop and run your business globally and online.

Copyblogger.com makes it easy to find articles about the core message and there are several ways to generate leads and build a list.

Do your research. Alltop.com compiles the best blogs on hundreds of topics so you can check out your competition.

10 Steps for Starting Your Blog

Before you get to the nitty-gritty of setting up your blog, there is some pre-work to do. This will ensure you start right and put your best foot forward

1. Before you do anything else, examine the reasons why you want to publish a blog. What is the purpose for the blog? How does the blog’s purpose relate to your business purpose?

2. What are the business objectives or outcomes you want from your business blog? Some people use a blog as a lead generator to build their database. Some are looking to build a visibility platform, while others use the blog to develop content for other purposes like books, articles and programs. What do you want to get out of your blog?

3. Who is your ideal reader? Who are you writing to/for? For most businesses I’ve worked with, the ideal reader is similar to their ideal client. It’s important to know your audience so you can meet their needs and address their concerns, challenges and what they’re looking for to improve their lives.

4. How do you want your readers to feel when they read your blog? This may seem like a weird question, yet it will help you tap into the emotions of your audience. Do you want your reader to be inspired, motivated, and moved to action? Again, tapping into this will help you focus your content on serving your reader.

5. What do you want your readers to DO when they read your blog? This relates to the goals you set for your blog. If your blog is a lead generator, then you must have very clear steps for guiding your reader to subscribe to get blog updates and/or get your lead generating content.

6. How much time do you have to devote to your blog each week? This is getting to the heart of blogging. If you can’t commit to writing a lot of valuable content, then you’re doing yourself and your readers a disservice. Be honest. The most effective and successful blogs are those with fresh, new content posted at least two to three times per week. Is that reasonable for you to manage? Will you have a team of bloggers? Remember, there are many, many ways to create content. It doesn’t have to be all you all the time.

7. What’s your blog’s core message? This relates to the topic of your blog and the niche you are focused on. What do you want your readers to learn? Why should anyone read your blog, and more importantly why should they subscribe to and follow your blog? This is another key piece to get in place before you start your blog. Brian Clark, publisher of Copyblogger.com, recommends creating “cornerstone content.” This is a series of posts that articulates your core message and provides new readers with an introduction and overview of what they can expect to learn from you.

8. Create an editorial calendar. It’s no secret that content rules on a blog, so it’s helpful to have a content plan going into the game. A key element of a good blog is having a list of 7-10 keyword-rich categories. Once you determine the categories (or subtopics) of your blog, you can plan your content calendar. If you plan on posting three times per week, then plot out post ideas for each of your categories. Make a list of 5 topics for each category. Then, fill in your calendar. Five topics times ten categories and you’ve got 50 blog posts in the pipeline.

9. Do your homework. Critical to your blog’s success is knowing your competition. Who is already blogging in your niche? What are they writing about? If blogs in your niche are scarce, this may be a great opportunity to dominate the search engines with your own content. Finding great blogs will take a bit of time and research. Start at Technorati.com and search for blogs using your keywords. Next use Alltop.com and Blogs.com to find the best of the best.

10. Build your blog. Now that the research is done, you know your message and have content ready to go, it’s time to get down to business and build the blog. This is where the fun part starts and cannot be easily covered in a bullet point. Two things to think about: 1) Are you a do-it-yourselfer or will someone build the blog for you? and 2) Are you a techie or not? There are many blogging platforms each with pros and cons. If you’re a techie, you may prefer WordPress.org. If you’re not comfortable with tech stuff, then TypePad may be a better option for you.

As you can see, there’s more to business blogging than initially meets the eye. The more preparation and thought you put into your blog BEFORE you start, the more successful it will be. Once the prep work is done and the blog is built, you’ll have a powerful marketing tool for creating a highly visible web presence and attracting the right people to your business.

What else would you add to this list to prep your blog for success? Share your best blogging tips in the comments below.