What effect does posting and liking as a Facebook page have?

Question

I run a 'Humans of New York'-like Facebook page.

Occasionally some photos will attract mean spirited, though not outright abusive comments.

Also, often people will post nice comments, or otherwise interesting constructive comments.

My question is - I have the option of either responding to, or liking comments, as the page. What effect is this likely to have in terms of community engagement.

In the case of the recent mean spirited comment, I opted at respond to the comment as myself, and not as the page name, but I feel like responding as the page name might have had a more dramatic effect.

Are there any general guide lines around here?

Answer 1

I'm not really sure that there is much in the way of guidelines on this. I normally respond based on which entity I'm responding as. If I'm responding as a member of the group, I'll respond as myself. If I'm responding as a statement of the group as a whole, then I'll post as the group.

The main advantage I could see is anonymity in posting as the group if you have multiple leaders involved. You can call someone out without having it impact the interpersonal relationship between you within the group (unless you are the only leader of the group). This also can potentially cause problems as well since someone may be more likely to lash out at the group as a whole if they don't like something posted by the group, but that may or may not be better than them targeting a particular member, even one in leadership.