Last week I posted directly on the Facebook page for this blog after I created a promotional video for an upcoming concert and the client had issues publicizing it with their own Facebook post.
https://www.facebook.com/478531892336962/posts/875709779285836/
SERVICE WITH A SMILE
I may get into how I captured and created the visuals later, but let’s get into the technical part of serving your client. Whether they be a paying customer or a friend, if you are helping someone out, I tend to consider that as doing somebody a favor.
That’s not from arrogance; I am trading my time for someone else to benefit from and that’s a favor. It doesn’t matter if I am also getting paid for it or not. There are literally 1 million other things I could, do including nothing, including things I choose or do not choose. In turn they are doing me a favor by participating in the partnership, whether they do that well or not!
With that attitude, if someone has a problem I may be irritated but I don’t get angry about it. If someone misinterprets something or doesn’t like what I have done, I may be disappointed but I also want to solve the problem, because I try to see us as a team.
Sometimes that’s difficult or nearly impossible, but I strive at least not to let that be my fault.
This case was none of those, although he asked for changes and additions I was hoping not to make. But by doing them I made it better.
LET’S GET TECHNICAL
And now we will get into the technical part and point of this post: Facebook is really annoying. If you don’t give them the video to host, unless it’s YouTube they like to show you a link. If you want to embed your Facebook post somewhere else, like I want to do now, you will generally get a link and not the visual you like, or if you do, not in a way that you can make look prettier.
Wait, what am I saying? That the big technology players don’t see each other as a collaborative team and try to solve the problem and make it easy for the end user that works with both of them? I was just talking about. customer service….
So funny.
Anyway, I’d shared the video via OneDrive this time, and I am assuming since he was on mobile, he grabbed the link and posted it to Facebook, and because I shared it with relaxed enough permissions it did technically work.
But it didn’t auto play, had a crap thumbnail, and it branded for the Microsoft product. Plus, he need to change the name of the file which was displayed instead of something more on brand, and without the extension. But it was already on his page and he was driving and couldn’t call me back, and people were going start liking it and then when we fixed it it was going to get zapped and all those likes would go away and they weren’t going to click like and share again.*
So my solution was to immediately copy the text of his post with links intact (and a couple of improvements like a direct link that you use to get tickets for the show.) And then I uploaded the video to Facebook and created a public post on my own page and made him share that as well. Then people could share his copy of the post of my copy of the post and it would all go through the same the locus point, so as it got more views and likes it would show up better in the Facebook feed and reach other people, and he would still get likes and shares for his page. And patrons for his concert.
I think that’s a win-win. The funny thing is that solution was actually my second attempt in five minutes. My first brilliant attempt was to share a post directly on his wall, the same way you go and wish somebody happy birthday so that the video or picture shows up in their feed.
The problem we had, however, was that my post was only visible to “friends” of his page, even though I would’ve posted it publicly, because that’s what his default page settings were. So then he shares it and it’s public on his page, but fans and performers can’t share it again because the details and video won’t show up, just his header (since he didn’t have to write anything that was already right there below it in my post!
I asked him to try to change the settings on my post to public, because I know that I cannot. I never heard back if he was able to do that, which would solve the problem later, but again, he was driving, so I provided the other solution, and he shared that one. It stayed public all the way down the line.
So next time I have Facebook-targeted content, I will include a list of the steps up front that “our team” will take to share to our best effect, and a plan ahead of time. I will probably create that plan on my own, using my own account and my page, and a relative to test things on their account. Maybe a dog picture.
—–David
P.S. Funny enough, if I had known that the last edit I sent was actually going to be approved and final, I could have put it on YouTube which would have posted friendly to his page, shared easily, and put all direct video likes in the same place, slightly benefitting me in the end, and giving me a little promotion for being a producer in the first place. But once the clock was ticking, uploading again to YouTube and creating all of that data set would’ve taken more time than the two different versions that I did to solve it the way I did.
* Oh and yeah I’m trying to lay down with an ice pack because I was in a car accident recently and my back hurts if I spent too much time at the computer!
Also published on Medium.
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