Rand Baldwin

If you run a Facebook “page” for business purposes, hopefully you are concerned with “online reputation management” and wish you could get an instant email notification whenever someone posts a comment on your wall. While FB isn’t quite as urgent a space as Twitter, it is still important to be aware of a post that needs your attention quickly. Nothing like someone posting a lame negative comment on Friday night and you don’t see it until you are back to work on Monday morning, eh?

So, surely this feature is part of Facebook, right? Well, as much as it has been requested for MONTHS by page managers, NOPE! At least not at the time of this blog post.

How about a clever workaround?

Use Google alerts.

In the “search terms” box, enter: http://facebook.com/pagename ago
Pagename=name of your profile/page (duh), and “ago” is a keyword.
(Why “ago?” Take a look at your Facebook page and note what follows every comment; A time stamp. If you are looking at an old one it has a date and time. But recent ones…. As soon as they show, it will say x seconds ago.)

Set type=everything, How often=as-it-happens, Volume=All results, Deliver to=your email address, then Create Alert.

While your at it, you may want to set up a few other alerts to be notified whenever your name or other keywords show up as new posts on the web. Now that Google picks up real time results from the web, AND social feeds including Twitter, this should prove a very effective tool.