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Five Tips to Grow Your Facebook Community
Someone recently told me they are the admin for their company’s Facebook page but didn’t know what to post about in order to help grow their community.
When I wrinkled my nose thinking, “Jeez, what a silly question,” I realize it’s not a silly question at all.
In fact, after looking through a variety of other Facebook company pages, it seems this is something that should be open for discussion.
We get this question all the time, “How can I grow my Facebook community?” The answer? Post engaging stuff.
Need more explanation than that? Check out my five tips on company Facebook posting.
Establish personality. You don’t have to post weekly contests or jokes to get your audience engaged with you. If you learned something new during a webinar, share that on your page. If your boss finds a YouTube video hilarious, post a link for the community to laugh along. If your new intern is helping out a nonprofit event on the weekend, post some of the pictures. Let your audience get to know the proverbial you.
Community news. Regardless if you’re a small business with local clientele or a national brand with clients around the world, let them know what’s going in your community. I’m in New York, our office is in Chicago, and our clients are across the nation. I constantly post about the weather here in the East or what famous face I saw last night at dinner. It’s like I’m writing a post card to my grandparents just letting them know I’m thinking of them.
Link love . We’re big believers in the you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours mentality. When I’m running low on things to post about I’ll check out some of our favorite pages and share their links on our page. This helps build our community and also helps build some of our friends and clients pages.
Use what your mama gave ya. Facebook already has some amazing tools to help with posting, including an easy way to share news links, videos, and my new favorite, polls. Everyone loves a good poll. It’s easy to just click the option and then it shows up on their feed expanding your impressions. Polls and links are also a great way to pull in industry news, but I try and leave most of that emotion to the blog.
Don’t over-post company news! We have Networked Blogs set up so every new blog post that runs on Spin Sucks automatically gets posted to our page. That way when I go in and post, I can be me and not overload our audience about Arment Dietrich this, Arment Dietrich that. No one cares about us, just what we can do to make your job easier.
These ideas work for us with our wonderful community. What types of focuses does your company post about that helps engagement?
Have a regular feature on your page where you entice users to post a picture of their favorite spot in the garden.
Great tips! For my two blogs (and the company I do SM for), I like to ask EASY questions. This-or-that and fill in the blank questions work every time! Like you said, it's so important to show personality. I tell companies I consult with that people do business with people, not businesses. You gotta act human.
momcommblog I agree. Be human!
A clear understanding of your Facebook audience is key in order to post engaging and relevant content as it is important to deliver messages and 'tone of voice' consistent with your brand/company, its values and personality. Otherwise it's fake and your audience will suss that out very quickly
whybarbara To play Devil's advocate here, we don't change for our audience. If they don't like my BF humor, then they tend to not go to our page. We want to engage with people we like and in turn, like us for who we are.
One thing that needs to be mentioned is Relevance. Once people "like" your page - they have certain expectations of what will happen next. And their actions are moslty dictated by those expectations.
On other words - if you run a real estate Facebook page, and all you post on your wall is lolcats - your best customers will "unlike" you soon. Though with lolcats you can possibly get the highest volume of interactions.
Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz was studying almost the same thing on Twitter, and he discovered that the Click Through Rate was way higher on the topics that people expected from him (SEO, Marketing, etc) as opposed to tweets on occasional topics.
So be relevant and valuable - this is the secret formula to success :)
timsoulo I agree with that statement but what shocks me is when I post non-relevant information like "Free coffee at Starbucks today" and when I look at my Facebook insights those posts get the most engagement, highest impressions and positive feedback. When I only post relevant information about my industry I get no engagement, event when I ask questions about the information. In my experience conducting Trivia, updating my followers about promotions is what increases my Page likes as well as engagement.
jennimacdonald thats exactly what I meant :) The sad thing is there are things (industries) that people do not care about in general. So you either find a way to represent your industry in some realy interesting/valuable/engaging way, or forget about Facebook at all. You can post promotions and lolcats all the time and generate a huge fanbase. A fanbase of people, who do not care about your product/service. You won't be able to sell them and and at the end you will not get any ROI out of all your efforts.
I know it's really cool to see your numbers grow, but I assume you're doing this because you want to make more money.. At least that's my philosophy :)
timsoulo Right, and I do mix it up a lot, and I do care about having more engagement than #s of followers (wish my boss thought the same) but what I struggle with is getting the right followers in our industry so I can talk about that information and connect with them when using it, because that is how I will get ROI down the road and build the life-long relationships.When I have been successful in doing so is by taking the not-so-fun info and somehow making it sound relevant to their lives. Social Media........ : )
jennimacdonald you just got a "like" from me for that post :)
timsoulo YES! : )
jennimacdonald timsoulo That is funnny. Me too! I help manage SM sites for traffic construction projects and stole an idea from a local police agency about always saying Good Morning and giving weather. And, people love that more than they engage with info about a road closure. Another thing I did recently is posted a large smiley face and simply said, "Smile. It will make your commute much less stressful" That got more impressions and likes than any thing I've posted in recent memory. It is an odd balance at times but what is clear from everyone's posts here is that this human touch combined with providing what a follower wants is what wins the day.
Take a step back from the page. Look at your profile (if you have one). Look at what you shared on your wall in recent weeks and months. Identify if the same people commented on your updates, or if you gained different people based on the content. Analyze whether specific times of day caused more people to comment. Grasp whether certain updates garnered more comments than other updates.
By understanding your profile (or your blog posts, youtube videos, or other content that is benchmarkable (sic)), you can more easily know what to write and how and when to write it on the page.
Ari Herzog I do not agree with this, I rarely use my personal page for business and do not post anything that is related to what is on my Business page, and since all of my FB friends are on the east coast and I'm on the west coast, the time change would not help me measure what time of day would be good to post on my Business Page.This may work for some if your Business Page mirrors your personal page but if you are an admin of multiple pages for clients this may not work for you.Thanks, just wanted to show both sides. : )
jennimacdonald I referred to time of day, not content.
Ari Herzog Yes which is why I brought up the point of my FB friends being on East Coast time and my personal posts relate to that time zone, but my Business Page is centered around West Coast time. For me they are 2 completely individual pages that do not relate but I think that for some people they could mirror the two. Just wanted to make sure people take all factors into consideration. Thanks!
jennimacdonald Ari Herzog I agree that looking at time of day and which days you post to watch engagement, but also keep an eye on competitor pages and see when they get their most traction. BUT I also agree with Jenni. I treat my personal page completely different than our company page. This post refers solely to company pages.
Great list, Molli! I especially like the point about link love. A funny thing happens when you acknowledge great work from those around you. It usually ends benefiting you just as much as it benefits them.
jessicamalnik I'll back up Jessica on this one. Yes, being nice, sharing, sincerity is key, no matter what your product, campaign or client is touting on FB.
jessicamalnik I find link love a great way to increase your brand awareness but I wish that more Page admins realized that. Only a few of the pages that I have linked to actually monitor their page frequently enough to see the post, and engage with me.
jessicamalnik Could not agree more. It's the same idea as paying it forward. We all have a page to be heard. If I like what I hear on some other company's page, I share it with our FB audience.
All great ideas. People seem to get so focused on publishing content that is so specific to their company, they come across as one dimensional. None of us is THAT one dimensional! Personality and non-business related items are crucial!
KenMueller Agreed. Personality and being interesting outside your area of expertise can go a long way.
joebertino KenMueller It's separating church and state. If people want marketing rants, they read the blog, if people want a brain escape, they check out our FB page, and if people want strategy, they call us.
A great to-do list Molli, and for those of us who already do those things it's a great reminder to make sure we're constantly doing a variety of all. Social Media is constantly changing and so should your strategy! : )
jennimacdonald Thanks for your comments. We're on the same (Facebook) page. :)
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