This one is super quick, but easy to miss if you’ve never had to do it.

When creating posts for your personal profile, Facebook will automatically strip out the link text if it’s included at the end of the post.

For example:

Becomes this once the post button is clicked:

The same is not true for Facebook fan pages. When you’re creating a post for your fan page, you must manually strip out the link text if you do not want it included in the final post. For example, if you wanted to post about the new Snapchat Geofilters:

Having the link included in the post text looks unprofessional, and eats up valuable character count. Short, concise Facebook posts perform better than longer blocks of text. When every character counts, why let your links sink your chances of being seen in the feed?

Luckily, removing the link is literally as simple as waiting a few seconds, then deleting it from the post text!

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Earlier this evening I spotted a tweet from John Russell about a new Facebook feature:

To kick it off: FB launched short urls to help brands get users talking to them inside Messenger: for @techcrunch -> https://t.co/HgNnaAQKfS

— Jon Russell (@jonrussell) February 19, 2016

The core motivation behind this change appears to be to eventually sell more ads: Facebook Plans To Put Ads In Messenger (TechCrunch)

Regardless of whether you intend to use the ad functionality, being able to link your customers straight into a direct message is a big plus!  If you’ve ever tried to get a community member to send you a direct message, you know how difficult that can be. Once someone has liked a fan page, they seldom (if ever) return to the page itself. Many users have no idea how to send a fan page a message, and are often afraid to ask how when requested to do so. This solution makes it a much simpler process.

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Say you’re trying to find an older post on Facebook. You know you tagged your friend in the post, but that’s all you have to go on. How do you find that post again?

One way to accomplish this is to use the ‘See Friendship’ option.

My friend Andrew has a thing for cars. At one point last year, Andrew made the mistake of stating he had too many ‘wheeled things’. I screencapped the message, posted it, and said I’d resurrect the thread when he bought another car. Because I’m a nice person who clearly isn’t motivated by pranks…

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