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Police facebook page admin settings

New Facebook Administrator settings for your Police Departments page

With your police facebook pages you have had the ability to add multiple administrators to a page.  Some police departments have quite a number of admins and some use only one.  WiredBlue has assisted a number of agencies with facebook.  We know that some have struggled with adding others as administrators because it is an obvious risk to give someone else control of your page.  (If you weren’t thinking that you should be)

Well facebook is making it easier now to assign admin user roles to your law enforcement agency staff and also to third parties.

Under the new system, page admins can be assigned specific roles:  The top role remains “Manager”, there is also “Content Creator”, “Moderator”, “Advertiser” and “Insight Analyst”.

Facebook page managers have the ability to send messages, view insights and create posts. They are also the only role which can access admin roles, and remove other administrators.

In the past, staff who simply wanted to access a Facebook page’s admin panel to view statistics on how users were engaging with it needed full admin rights – something which could be a disaster waiting to happen.

If you are a Police Chief or designated Administrator, and sharing access to the page with other police agency staff, you would be wise to check the roles used by your co-admins now and adjust them as required.

Facebook’s  describes the different roles for admins.

Here’s how you check who is an admin on your Facebook page:

• Open your Page’s admin panel
• Click Edit Page
• From the left column menu, click Admin Roles
• It will display the current admin names and the role they have
• Click below the name to choose the role of each admin
• Click Save Changes

Giving a co-admin too much control could be an issue down the road, if their account is compromised or if something goes wrong and they try and take control of the page from you.

Post Scheduling

You can also now set up and schedule your facebook posts.  Perhaps you are already using a 3^rd party tool like Hootesuite to do scheduling of posts, basically its the same concept.

When you post there is a bottom clock icon, if you select this it will allow you to set a future date and time to post.  So now you have the option to do it right from facebook or continue to use your other platforms.

What do the new facebook page timeline changes mean for your police departments facebook page?

First off, hopefully you know what timeline is at this point.  If you don’t please click here 

We just changed over a few hours ago.  Here is what we noticed so far.

Tabs and Apps have Changed

So one of the biggest changes noticed is that for departments using custom tabs and applications the size and placement of the tabs has changed.  The menu that used to be on the left hand side is gone.  While your applications are still there, they’ll display in the boxes underneath the cover photo.

Only three tab boxes are viewable at any given time. To see more, visitors will have to expand the panel. Obviously those 3 tab boxes will get the most visibility.  This change takes away the nice menu feature many agencies were using for navigation purposes.

Also the size of the tab page has now changed.  For instance, MyPD app customers have a police app tab page that WiredBlue created for them and this used to be set to a certain smaller width.  Now with the new change the app page will not fill the whole allotted area and will display improperly.

*Note for MyPD customers – We are working to fix this and will shortly bring your agency a new police app download page that makes use of all the space now allotted.

Landing Pages are gone

A few savvy departments were creating welcome pages and forcing new visitors to land on a welcome page or something similar, rather than the wall page.  Well that is gone.  Another for the minus column.

You can now “Pin” a favorite post

This will cause the pinned post to be displayed at the top of the page.  Agencies can only pin one post at a time.  So if you have a favorite message or (perhaps an app) you want to display to your public, you could use this as an alternative, to say the top spot on your old menu.

Messages

Agencies can now send and receive messages with your users.  So now you have something else to check for on your page, messages from users.  If you are one of those departments that has warnings and disclaimers on your social media pages, you might want to place a disclaimer that you don’t monitor messages 24/7.

Overall there are some positive things but we think brands and agencies are losing a few good features that had worked well.   We are not sure why facebook always has brands and personal profiles so similar.  We would like to see them have different features and layouts but for now the page is very similar to your personal timeline.

MyPD app website

Are you a MyPD police app user or member of the public looking for more information? You can download the My Police Department app and learn more about MyPD by visiting MyPDapp.com

We just made our new app website live.  MyPDapp.com is where to go if you are looking to download and find information about the My Police Department app.  If you are a Police Department using the app you can now direct members of your community to MyPDapp.com for news and information.  If you are currently an app user or member of the public looking for app information MyPDapp.com is the spot to visit!

Have you claimed your facebook page name?

By Peter Olson: Over the past few years I have assisted a number of police departments in the creation and design of their various social media pages. Usually this includes adding custom tabs to the facebook menu or a more professional designed background for twitter or youtube. One thing I have noticed on over half of the police departments on facebook is that they still have not “officially” claimed a facebook page name.

Simply titling your police department facebook page is not claiming the name. I have seen a number of departments with hundreds or thousands of fans who still have a url that looks something like this: facebook.com/smith-police-department/903239081112221111. If you don’t have facebook.com/smithpolice the chances are you have not claimed your name.

There are two reasons you might want to claim your name:

1. Once someone claims the name it is no longer available. So you will have to use another variation of the name you want. This can make it more difficult for people to find you depending on the name you choose. If you happen to be from a city with a popular name across the country and you are the last to claim the name, you might wind up with something that looks nothing like the name of your department.

2. It makes it much easier to direct people to your page. Instead of that long URL you can use the simple one which is shorter and looks nicer in emails, on posters, etc…

Ok, so here is how you do it. It is quite easy!

1. Log in as the page admin

2. Go to edit page

3. Click on Basic Information -Note, you must have 25 fans to claim a page (though I did manage to do it once with no fans)

IMPORTANT!! DO NOT CLAIM THE PAGE NAME AS YOUR NAME!!!!

This has happened at least twice to admin who have not claimed their own personal name yet. So they ended up with their personal facebook name being facebook.com/smithpolice instead of that being the page name. Not only do you not want your personal name to be that of the police department but now the name is also not available. I also recommend claiming your own name before claiming the page name so you can’t make a mistake.

Any questions, send us an email and we will give you a hand!