Perhaps traditional email is going the way of the fax machine, as we all become more dependent of the instant communication of text messages and tweets. Certainly Facebook’s engineers are counting on that evolution as they roll out Messages.
Nevertheless, the overwhelming majority of computer users continue to use ‘traditional’ email services and software, even as they keep up with their personal and professional Facebook sites. Yet the folks at Facebook have not offered any means to have the one medium keep track of the other.
Fortunately for all of us, Ching Ya, an enthusiastic blogger on all things social-media, has found some free-to-inexpensive ways to get email notifications of postings, comments, and ‘Likes’ brought to your organization’s Facebook page.
She began her hunt last fall, in an effort to solve what she believed to be a ‘not tolerable’ shortcoming in Facebook: The only way to see if you have changes to your site is to sign in to your site and look. She found a couple of third-party applications that periodically swept one’s FB site for changes and emailed you notice of what they found.
Each had its own limitations (especially as free versions – the paid-for apps overcame most of them), so she vowed to keep looking. She has recently updated her findings on her same blog.
The first example comes from a group of Norwegian programmers, who have developed HyperAlerts. The homepage is a model of clean, stylistic, efficiency, and within about five minutes of registration, you are getting notices via your tried-and-true email service of what’s going on at your FB site:
Hyper Alerts is a feature for everybody who wants email reports of posts and comments on a selected Facebook-page. You don’t have to be an administrator of a page to get our email alerts, and you can select as many pages as you want. You can get alerts each hour, day, week or month – or immediately if you so prefer. Our emails show the original posts and comments, and are a great way to archive the history of your selected pages – and even make it searchable!
One caveat Ms. Ya points out (and one that HyperAlerts presents) is that one must open up one’s page to the world for HyperAlerts to gain access to all your pages. Such a relaxation of privacy is probably less of a concern for nonprofits’ organizational pages than it is for individuals and families.
The other package – with one of my favorite names in this SM universe – ‘MediaFeedia‘ offers not only email updates of what others post on your page but opportunities to control other aspects of your own postings and images from a single ‘space.’ Its abilities to cover a good deal of ground might be especially useful for organizations looking to reach out to constituents and raise funds via social media.
Manage multiple pages? Manage a single campaign that involves a lot of data? Aggregate ALL of your facebook inbound and outbound activity and put your campaign on auto pilot with MediaFeedia!
Ms. Ya is especially excited about MediaFeedia, and we agree that it offers flexibilities that – if you need them – give an edge to HyperAlerts. Both are free, though, so try them out to see which is better for your community. Ching Ya has gotten some comments about each of the services, and we also would love to hear from you once you have tried them out!