Introduction to Facebook Engagement
Facebook pages are an interesting beast. Unlike Twitter, it's not likely that there will be any organic growth from "random" followers without external prompts - this is especially true if you don't have a physical presence to help you advertise. As a topic in itself, Facebook is a much more private medium for conversation between people and brands. Whenever a person comments on a Facebook page using their account, other users following the same company will be able to see the information you make public. Case and point, in order to have people interact with your Facebook page, they need to be genuinely interested in having their person associated with your brand.
Kickstart Your Page, Give It A Fighting Chance
- Fill out your page with as much content as you can (this means an address, phone #, websites, mission statement, products, email addresses). If you want people to trust your brand, give them something to work with.
- Kickstart your # of likes and get a vanity URL for your page by doing the friends and family push. It's important to get that vanity URL so you can start promoting your brand easier in passing.
- Create valuable and rich content for your users, which could be anything from HD photos to videos, or basic polls for engagement.
- Watch your language! Talk to your audience like you think they'd like to be spoken to. If that means courteous, be courteous, if it's coarse, make it coarse. This is a page for you to interact with your unique audience.
- Test keywords. Try to see what kind of action words will get comments and likes.
- As a key practice, you might try using specific words (like, take, submit, watch, post, check, comment, click, etc.) to get people to like your posts. You might need to start using other words to get comments (post, comment, tell us, check, like, submit, share, click, take, etc.). At the end of the day it will matter largely on your demographic.
- Check the competition, see what's working for them and what's not working. You can see this at face value by just visiting their page.
- Don't be inquisitive. Studies have shown that words like "how, why, what" attempt to prompt long responses from users and are too personal. Try words like "when, where, and should" to create questions that are softer but still garner response.
- Don't just post random updates happening in your company, if you don't care, no one else will.
Analyze Your Users, Customize Your Presence
- Use Facebook Insights, it's invaluable to know your audience. Insights will tell you specifically what times people are interested, what they're liking and commenting on, all of which you can optimize on and make an awesome customized forum for your people.
- Analyze the peak hours of engagement through Insights and testing different time variables. This might mean having your marketing person post at times like before work, after work, and late night because research has shown this time to have the largest effect.
- Analyze the days of peak engagement, which for some companies and brands might be the end of the week because their constituents are looking for something to procrastinate on.
Offline Engagement Is Necessary
- We've all seen brands do this. They make sure they tie their Facebook campaign closely to all of their marketing materials - whether its commercials, printed materials, on their website, at parties, etc.
- Don't just put a Facebook logo on your website and especially "unclickable" material and expect people to convert through this. It won't work. Try using conventions like QR codes to help bridge the digital to physical gap.
- It goes without saying that engaging an audience online requires offline groundwork, so start talking to people and telling them to like your brand and give them something to remember that.
Third Party Applications
- Use Facebook apps like Wildfire and Involver to drive interaction (if it works). These sites help convert viewers to "likers" by throwing up richer pages that prompt users for a "like" before they get access.
Always Remember To
- Ask yourself "Why would they care?" because if you can't answer this yourself, then chances are neither can they.
- Check statistics in Facebook Insights like impressions, comments, likes, and analyze with trends in mind. There's a reason those metrics are made available to you.
- Promote your Facebook page online with things like email signatures, website headers and footers, through Twitter or other social networks, on your business cards (with URL), and any place that gets you impressions.
Posted via email from Welcome to GeorgeDy.com
Posts
