Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Facebook - don't be that guy

Running a Facebook fan page seems pretty easy.  Set the thing up, post when you feel like it, and get the attention and publicity that only Facebook can offer.

If only it were that easy.  Having helped with the Facebook page of my Tramping Club, and seen other organisations' facebook presence either succeed or fail, I've found a few key things you need to keep in mind.

Post stuff that your audience is interested in - not stuff you want to tell them

Hopefully, in general, they'll be the same sort of thing!  But keep general interest, "off message" posts going.

Your website is where you old your metaphorical press conferences, and your discussion forum is a dinner party that you're hosting and gently steering the conversation.

Your Facebook page is a more raucous party that your fans have shown up to and are wandering about in trying to make friends. You don't want to be that boring guy who talks about nothing but work. You need to have your work conversation interspersed with interesting, off topic, slightly controversial posts that people like, and share, and talk about. If its just stuff you want people to know, rather than stuff others want to read, then your fan base won't grow.

You also don't want to be that other guy who sits in the corner and doesn't talk to anyone. So aim for around 2-3 posts a week, and sometimes post about less important things just to fill the silence before it becomes awkward.

There's science behind it.  Science!  It all starts on your page's 'insights' page:



Things to note here are:

We have 189 fans - that is, a post will be seen by up to 189 people.  But those fans have 38,000 friends (and you've got to assume that a lot of those go tramping if they're friends with a tramper).  If we post something interesting enough that our fans like or comment on the post - it can reach 38,000 people because it will appear in their timeline and their friends will see it.

So: interesting posts get seen by massively more people than boring posts - and new people, not just people who already know us.

The graph shows our 'reach' - how many people see our posts.  Purple blobs are posts.  You can see that when we had a dry period of no posts - our reach went massively down.  More posts - better reach.  Better reach - more people seeing our brand and our name.

So: post often and post interesting, otherwise your fan page withers on the vine.

Underlying this is Facebook's 'edge ranking'.  When browsing facebook, have you noticed that the news feed is not in time order?  Stuff from interesting pages - pages you interact with a lot, and pages other people interact with a lot - are pushed closer to the top of your news feed, and boring pages - pages that don't create much interaction - get pushed to the bottom.

So: Post interesting stuff that's just plain interesting (not necessarily 'on message'), otherwise no-one will see the posts you actually want them to read.

What constitutes an interesting post?  The table underneath tells us that.  You can look through it and see which posts are talked about more than others.  For example, a post about fixing the lodge roof was one of our best stories.  That's all down to a couple of people that commented, and that made people comment on those comments, and so on.  Comments feed comments and they feed reach.  That's also why slightly controversial posts and comments are gold (as long as they're not negative or detrimental!) - prompt a bunch of people to comment and you've hit reach paydirt.

Here's facebook's version of the above (they talk about paying them money to promote posts a lot more than I did)
https://www.facebook.com/business/engage

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