Dear mumpreneurs and dadpreneurs,
Once you have set up your Facebook business page and as you are building up your fan base by sharing your page in groups, on your personal account or with your email contacts, you must keep your page 'alive'. This is the greatest challenge for page owners and page administrators.
There's no need to worry, here are three key elements to focus on: Content, presentation and timing.
Great content is essential. You must keep it real and you must adapt to your audience. There's no magic recipe but in general remember that Facebook users are unwinding while they are connected. An infographic on content that people crave made by marketing experts gives you 21 possibilities.
As you can see, you are not supposed to be posting about your products or services.... all the time. You are allowed a 5% of your total posting quota. Your Facebook page is for you to communicate with your fans, to create connections and to build trust. Once they know you and if they like you, they will buy from you. This is a long term process. You have to spend time or money building this engagement and then you will see results. You have to wait at least 6 months, so be patient.
How can you come up with ideas for your posts? We recommend Pinterest at www.pinterest.com, an online pinboard that allows you to organise visuals in categories that you choose and you can always go back to them to use it for your posts or follow pinners with similar interests for new ideas. It also has a Search function that I always use when I have an idea and need a great image to go with it.
Go to their site, request an invite and you'll get an email within 2 days. Happy pinning!
Pinterest and Facebook go hand in hand as the former provides all the visuals that your posts require plus it is an unlimited source of inspiration. Remember that the best way to present a post is accompanying it with a photo or a graphic, colourful and meaningful. Recent findings suggest they are 3 times more attractive to a fast browser than posts without a visual.
The third important point to consider is timing of your posts. In the Summer people are more active during the hottest times of the day when they are indoors or late at night before they go to sleep. I've noticed people are most active between 2:30 and 5 pm and then after 10 pm until early morning hours. Your audience might not follow this pattern and patterns change with seasons, so you must always check the response to your posts. One way of doing this is by clicking on your Insights from the Admin Panel for your page: a couple of line graphs will show what posts were more popular and you can click on each post individually and revise posting time.
A final piece of information for today is that unfortunately not all your posts will be seen by your fans, even if they have your page in a special interest list and if they have ticked your page to show on their news feed. There is an algorithm called Edgerank that ranks posts according to 3 criteria: each fan's previous interaction with the page, how many likes, comments and shares the post got overall and how recent the post is. Then Facebook will filter accordingly and decide what posts will appear on each fan's news stream. The average percentage of posts seen by any page's fan is only 16%. This all leads to the general recommendation of posting interesting content with calls to action like asking your fans to 'like' or 'share' or 'comment' and posting more than once a day.Five very simple ideas and a clear explanation on this are given by Jonathan Payne on the following link http://www.business2community.com/facebook/edgerank-and-five-simple-ways-to-increase-facebook-engagement-0227704#comment-446931
The latest posts, the ones with a visual and the ones from the pages you have interacted more with will be at the top of the list at any time you, as a fan, log on to Facebook. So post more than once a day from your page, but at least once a day, at peak times to target your audience and prompt them to interact with your page by liking, commenting or sharing your post. You can schedule your posts ahead, share informative links and always be real and be yourself. You can also post the same content more than once, at different times, on different groups and/or on your personal account as well as on your page.
Please feel free to ask or comment on any of the points above. For details on how to do any of the above you can visit my page on the link below, call me or email me.
Many thanks for reading,
Veronica
99 66 32 86
