Facebook is a big part of the online marketing mix. When it's the right platform for your brand, Facebook fan pages can have some pretty amazing results in driving the awareness and engagement of your brand. That said, its only effective if your brand's posts, pictures, links and updates are actually being noticed. Since a majority of people don't check back onto fan pages daily, it's essential for your posts to appear on their news feeds to capture their attention. If you're a veteran user of Facebook, you know that not every post you submit gets seen by all of your friends, and that Facebook runs on specific (and secret) algorithms to select which posts it shows and to whom. So what can marketers do to increase their chances of showing up on more walls? I came across this Business Insider article entitled How Facebook Decides What To Put on Your News Feed. Although their experiment was based on personal profile postings and news feeds, to some degree it should hold true for fan page posts as well.
1. Provide compelling content that inspires your fans to click on your fan page - this includes links, pictures and videos. Links trump plain text, and photos and videos trump links. The article explains that Facebook operates on a user engagement and clicks, because they increases the amount of time people spend on Facebook. So, the more posts you have that are inspire engagement, the more relevance your posts will have.
2. Comments go a long way to helping your post appear on more news feeds, and generating more click-throughs to your content. Ask open ended or opinion questions to encourage comments on your Facebook posts.
3. Inspire people to visit your page. Post links to your page on other channels or provide content that encourages sharing. This one may sound obvious, but the more traffic your fan page gets, the more relevance it will have, and the more it will appear on your fans' news feeds.
4. Avoid only targeting people with a lot of friends. It is harder to get onto the news feeds of people with 500+ friends, than it is to break through onto feeds of people with less friends. To help build momentum invite people from both ends of the spectrum.
How do you get your content noticed? Any tips or secrets you wish to share?
-Heather
PS: Don't forget to become a fan of BlogCampaigning on Facebook! Same great content, different platform!