Facebook made a giant leap forward this week by adding a layer of desperately needed tools that let companies manage their pages in a more professional manner. They are also hitting up page owners to pay for better placement of their posts, but does it work?

First let’s dig in on the changes to the admin function of Facebook Pages.

Admin Roles: Not all admin rights are created equal (and shouldn’t be)

This week Facebook added the ability to set multiple admin roles for a business or organization’s page. Each role is allowed certain abilities such as viewing insights, posting as the page, or editing content.

This change allows page owners to be more efficient, because they can give the right amount of access to the right people. For example, a page owner may set up a team to moderate posts. This team needs the ability to delete inappropriate posts (such as spam or vulgar language), but they don’t need the ability to write new posts or add apps to the page. With this new change, page owners can assign admin roles based on need, instead of being forced into assigning all-or-nothing administrative rights.

The following table lists the available admin roles. More information is on Facebook’s Admin Roles help page.

This feature shows how Facebook is becoming more business-friendly. Setting up different admin roles is a no brainer for page owners (and a welcome addition to the platform!), but not all of Facebook’s features are necessarily great for business. For example, promoted posts is a feature page owners should test out before jumping in completely.

Promoted Posts: Pushing content to the right people (for a price)

Last week Facebook started rolling out Promoted Posts to some of their page owners. AllFacebook describes the new feature like this:

“According to the Facebook guide, after entering the details of the post, page administrators of pages with more than 400 likes can click the promote button and set their desired budget, for the lifetime of the post (not a daily budget), and the social network will generate an estimated reach at that budget figure. Once page admins determine a suitable budget, hitting the save button will launch the promoted posts.”

Basically, it’s a paid feature that improves the chances that people who are most valuable to your business or organization will see your post. But how does Facebook determine who’s valuable? That’s the question Thomas Baekdal asks in his analysis, “Initial Test of Facebook’s Promoted Posts.”* He found that Facebook filtered out fans of his page based on how often they engage with his content (likes, comments, etc.). He was upset by this, saying that often listeners of content are just as important as those who interact with the content.

What’s it all mean for you?

As usual, content is king. When writing for Facebook (or any medium), it’s important to create compelling content that people want to read and share with others. And it’s important to monitor your content and how people are interacting with it, so you can stay engaged in the conversations you start or join.

*Note that Thomas Baekdal’s analysis is normally a report that you must pay for. However, one of the members for that site was allowed to share it publicly by using a member-specific link, which I’ve included in this blog post.