New age businesses don’t spend time debating whether they should have a presence on social media or not. Customers these days demand that they be able to tweet or post on your Facebook page if they have any issue with regard to your product/service or even to drop in a good word. Instead, the debate has now shifted to which channel should be used to reach out to the customer and how much time, money and effort be invested in it. Out of all the social media channels, Facebook is undoubtedly the one with the most reach and the one with the most varied audience. Here are a few tips for a Facebook Page Manager which will help you to effectively communicate your brand’s message to your followers through your company’s Facebook page:
1. Analyze the engagement level of your posts – One would think that the popularity level of any Facebook post on a page would be quite straight forward to gauge by looking at the number of likes and the nature of comments. However, this is not always the case. More often than not, you share a link to your company website or blog or product page along with the image or status update and people might end up clicking on that link and entering a new web page. They might not come back to like the post but that does not mean that the post did not benefit your company as the person might have purchased your product or read your blog post. So it is crucial to analyze the engagement level of your posts at various levels. Likes and comments are just one aspect. You can get more detailed information by clicking on the part below your post where it conveys to you how many people saw that post. If it is a photo, it will show you how many people viewed that photo and if it is a link, it will tell you how many people clicked on that link. You also get to know if there was any negative feedback to the post resulting in people unliking your page.
2. Schedule your frequent posts – A lot of the times, we need to post the same thing more than once at regular intervals to ensure that it reaches the maximum number of people. However, for a small business, this means wastage of time that could otherwise have been spent on engaging with the customers. Don’t fret as there is a solution to this problem. Facebook has a feature which allows you to schedule a post to be published at a later date. Be it a link to a contest that you are running or image for an exclusive product launch that you are building up to – all you have to do is create the post just like you do normally but instead of clicking on ‘post’, you need to click on the down arrow beside ‘post’. You will get three options – schedule, backdate and save draft. Click on ‘schedule’ and select the desired time. You will get a notification when the scheduled post is posted on your page.
3. Watch your timing – Like in everything, timing is important while posting on a Facebook page too. It is of enormous significance that your post reaches as many people as possible. To ensure this, you need to know what the optimum time for you to post is meaning what is the time that majority of your page followers are online. This can be best determined by a trial and error method as it varies from page to page and location to location. However, past research has shown that early afternoon is a good time to post. Also, if you are an international brand with followers across the globe, then you need to pay more attention to the timing of your posts as your audience is spread across multiple time zones.
4. Correct usage of Hashtags – The first thing that you need to know about Hashtags is that they are not a Facebook invention. Twitter and Instagram are the places where you can use any hashtag that you want. On Facebook, you might want to tread carefully. To create and use your own hashtag on Facebook is risky unless you are a big brand with passionate fans or you are really confident of the virality (if that’s even a word) of your post. It’s always better to go with simple hashtags so that you can reach your non-followers. Using too many Hashtags (like on Instagram) is also not advisable as it may put off your followers.
5. Content is King – This is the basic principle of posting anything on social media. You may be a big brand, you might have brainstormed with your marketing team to come up with an awesome hashtag, you may even have exceptionally funny memes at your disposal but at the end of the day, it’s the content that is the king. Underneath all the marketing gimmicks, if your Facebook page doesn’t provide valuable information to the reader regarding your product or blog, then it will be very difficult to retain your followers. This does not imply that you need to post useful links all the time. Mix it with a few jokes, some info graphics and inspirational quotes once in a while to avoid being monotonous. A balance is what is required for an efficient social media strategy.
