If your business has a Facebook Page, you’ll need to work at it for it to be successful.
Likes and Follows are important – and often others will judge you based on your numbers. However, there’s much more to a successful Facebook Page than big numbers of likes/follows.
To really make your page work you need engagement. That means people who see your posts and like them or comment. The challenge for most Page owners is that, unless you pay for boosts or ads, few of your posts will appear in the home feed of those who’ve liked your Page or followed it.
In truth, even the posts of the people you’ve accepted as friends don’t appear in your home feed. Facebook filters posts so you only see the posts from the 20-25 people you interact with the most. When it comes to Pages the filter is virtually zero.
Let’s look at it from the user’s point-of-view. If you use Facebook at all, as an individual, you’ve probably liked quite a few pages. How many of these do you actively visit? How many of their posts turn up in your home feed?
In order to get people to keep coming back your posts need to have a big engagement factor. So your first task is to work out what your audience will be interested in. This might include:
- Hints and tips around your area of expertise
- Short videos showing people a simple step-by-step process
- Interesting pictures
- Fun things
The sad truth is that people are more likely to watch something entertaining than something enabling on Facebook. The secret is to find content that ticks both those boxes!
This is a challenge for most people and it takes time so here are a few ideas to build your content up.
- Open your eyes, When you’re online keep looking at the things you find as potential material. Sharing other people’s content is fine as long as it’s clear that it’s shared.
- Convert things to visual images, like infographics or diagrams.
- Get comfortable talking to a camera. Video is far more popular than text only or even images. What could you create? Videos need to be short, so it doesn’t have to be a painful process, the secret is prepare well and the actual video will come over effectively. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just easy to watch.
- Have a place where you keep useful links and material. Sometimes you may find things that aren’t relevant today, but might be later. Keep a OneNote or EverNote page with all these links to refer to when you need material.
- Pinch other people’s ideas! I don’t mean literally, but when you find something that really works, think about how you might do something similar about your own business.
When you start getting likes and comments you’ll find you’ve built a community.
