Facebook confirmed at the f8 conference that not all stories are guaranteed to get into even the recent stories section (yep not even the bottom of the bottom bit!!) let alone 'top stories' in your fans facebook streams. (via edge rank blog)
So before you post another listing update, or set up another auto feed for your flickr or tumblr - read this post with useful tips for improving your facebook fan page and learn how to create a good strategy for increasing your fan numbers and engagement on facebook. Aka being tickertastic! (yep I invented a new word there)
In my last post "Want more facebook fans, comments and likes?" I concentrated on activity off your page, networking on other peoples fan pages to bring them (and their fans) over to your own. In this post I'm looking expressly at activity on your page.
As you would expect, I've been reading a lot about the new changes to fb. Industry experts claim that minimising the number of posts per day will help with engagement (likes, comments). I agree with this and have seen an excellent increase in engagement across all of the facebook pages I manage using a 'quality not quantity' strategy. Rather than posting 6 times in a row think about maybe two or three times a day and mix it up a little. Posting rapidly straight after another update may see it not reaching many news feeds and also impacting the previous posts staying power. Use a scheduling tool, like tweetdeck or hootsuite if you don't have time to log in more than once a day.
Mix it up a little!
Use different types of posts - status updates, photos, links, polls, videos and notes. Minimise where just links or just photos are being posted in a row even if they are a day apart. Remember, the more engaged your fans are the more likely they are to see your posts the next time they log in - so it needs to be interesting and the new facebook (just like the old facebook) favours variety. The aim is to get into peoples top stories as often as possible.
Who are you talking to?
As fan page owners we want to make sure that our posts are not being 'demoted' if they ever do reach the lofty heights of being someone's 'top story'. So make sure they are of interest to your fans. Write down a few notes about what your fans want from you - to be amused, to be enlightened, to be inspired, to find out the latest news on your craft, or about your shop? Chances are it's a mixture of all of these, create a plan to offer variety and to appeal to all the different fan types you have across the course of a weeks posts.
Word of Mouth - Tickertastic!
The new ticker in peoples sidebars should be showing little updates about who just liked *your* status update and who just added *your page* as a fan. Photo's boing out of it like this photo from a page that I am now very much 'liking' as a result.
This is why it's so important to 'engage' your fans to comment and like your posts to increase the chances of their friends finding your page.
Measure your results
As long as you have 30+ fans you can start using facebook insights. There is much more to look at, but a quick indicator of how you are doing is a look at the list of impressions available in the 'interactions' tab. Sort this by clicking on the top of the impressions column to show which posts did particularly well.
Impressions are not clicks, facebook measures the amount of times your post got seen, it also does not represent unique people seeing your posts, it could be the same person seeing the update 5 times. You may find that although some posts don't get many impressions, they get a lot of engagement / feedback.
Pay particular attention to which types of post work for you and what time they were posted. Do increased number of posts per day / per week seem to affect the number of impressions per post? use the information to update and improve your strategy. You could use a resource like Crowdbooster to find out when the optimum time to post is based on analysis of the history of your posts to date.
Thanks for reading!
x Hilary