In order to have a successful business, you need an active social media presence with active followers. The only way to ensure that is by posting quality content that will bring engagements and increase your reach. It is important to have high quality followers that are active and loyal to your page.

The marketing techniques and strategy required to build a following need time and resources. You need to invest in researching your audience, their needs and wants.

Timeliness

Staying on your strategically devised schedules and following them to post any content is very important. Timeliness with posts makes sure that there is an order in your content. If you are not available at all times of posting you can easily schedule the posts through Facebook. Just write the post normally and follow these steps;

  • Start creating your post at the top of your Page’s Timeline.
  • Click next to Publish and select Schedule.
  • Below Publication, select the date and time when you want the post to publish.
  • Click Schedule.

This will let you schedule the post for anytime and any day of the week. Set the time slots for prime time of 8 to 12 in the evening, since people are more active on social media in that time.

For the day, you can schedule the posts at lunch break since professionals tend to check their smart phones and social media during that free time.

However, this rule is not necessary to follow and may fail sometimes because of the fact that everyone posts between these times. In that case, you can post at odd times for a day or two days of the week to add freshness in the time slots.

Remember that people need and use social media to keep up with society and to stay update, which means they do not want to read yesterday’s news. They are constantly refreshing and scrolling through their feeds to find new content and Facebook algorithm is built in a way that promotes newer posts and stories automatically more compared to the old ones. The newer posts and content also has the tendency to bring more interaction. Facebook analyzes the posts’ success based on the interactions and engagements they had. Posts with more engagements and higher levels of user engagement get a higher score than those that do not. For example, leaving a comment and a reply on a post or picture takes more time and effort on the user’s part, which means that user actually engaged with the post and read it, unlike just clicking the “Like” button. Posts that have more interactions from users rank higher in a newsfeed, so they are more likely to be viewed.

Quality Content

Photos and videos are considered as the most engagement worthy posts. Pictures shared from the third source and websites show up as thumbnail images in the users’ Facebook newsfeed. Since the thumbnails are small in size and you cannot see the whole thing, users need to interact with it by clicking on it. Make sure that your content is click and share worthy.

Add a caption or one-liner post with the pictures that further encourages audience to respond to it or leave their opinions in the form of comments and tags.

Quotes are also considered qualitative content if they are relatable for your audience and coherent with you brand / product’s theme. They are also considered the most apt and proper way to spread your ideas and the ones you support. Quotes generate a lot of engagements and interaction in the form of shares so it is best to use them while building a new Facebook page.

Similarly, graphics like visual media and videos have become very important in social media marketing strategy. Videos and Gifs are fast way to reach your audience and they are probably the most interactive type of content currently used for marketing and advertising reasons.

Instant Publishing Valuable Content

Facebook publisher is a new feature introduced recently for websites that rely heavily on content and news sharing. Publishing allows the posts to get opened within the browser or app, without making user go to a separate website or open a new browser.

Through instant articles, users can interact with posts better and read then whole story a lot faster than embedded links allow. This creates an interactive experience between users and uploader and powers up the process of information distribution. These instant published articles also have the ability to go viral because of the fast loading technology used. They have the ability to load ten times faster than a normal article opened in a new browser window.

The articles also feature “tilt-to-pan photos, auto-play video, interactive maps, and embedded audio captions” which allow the users to interact with their newsfeed and stories in an exceptionally striking way.

Instant articles not only provide a great experience for readers and Facebook users, they also make life easier for publishers as it is possible to use them from within the publishers; existing Content management system (CMS). You do not need new skills or special tools to understand the feature, which makes it even more fascinating.

Be Unique

The questions and puzzles that initiate a dialogue among audience and generate engagements are very necessary for fan pages. This content helps in making posts viral in nature.

You can incorporate humor in as well. Be funny and mold questions in a way that the answers are directly related to your brand or product being sold.

It is also seen through market research that users become 35% more interested in visiting your page if you are holding contests. More users mean more engagements and higher the engagements, the more viral your posts will become. This means that giving an incentive is a factor behind generating engagements.

Posts that contains emoticons receive 33% more comments than posts that do not. Talk casually with your customers, unless it is not super official. A little humor never killed nobody. Use jokes that show your brand’s personality and are witty at the same time.

Call for Action

Facebook provides businesses with great opportunity to build a strong relationship with its audience and customers. You can use that relationship into pursuing you followers to act on certain information. The process is known as Call to action (CTA) and is widely used as a marketing technique on social media.

The easiest way to do this is by generating valuable content and designing worthy pictures that will bring engagements in whatever form you need. These range from likes to comments, shares, tagging, clicking and reposting.

I have explained this in my earlier blogs through example, but here it is again. Direct your viewers to perform a certain action through these liners.

  • Like if you … (love spending time on Facebook)
  • Comment your thoughts … (on using Facebook for business)
  • Share if … (you are feeling motivated today)
  • Tag your friend … (who is always shopping online)

Stay Available

To let your audience know how much you care about them, you need to be highly active and responsive towards their opinions and thoughts.

It is a good practice in social media marketing to respond to comments and users personally. If someone has praised your content, be sure to thank them and ask them to check back later for more. Your customers and audience is trying to engage with you in the form of comments and replies. They have a number of thoughts and opinions that might be in the form of a question or suggestion.

Listen to these voices and read all comments if possible. If it is a genuine concern or opinion, highlight it and share it with your followers by giving the person due credit. People use your product so they are entitled to know about it so, for long queries it is best to provide the link of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) present on the website.

You can also involve fans in helping out other fans and their inquiries. Encourage a healthier relationship among followers themselves. If you feel that it is hard to keep up with all responses, you can use third party softwares, which support auto-responder for general comments.

You can rely on auto-responder for the time being and give detailed reply later when available.

These are some of the techniques used by marketers across every platform including Facebook to keep their fans and fan pages up and running. There are of course more on which you can rely and use across professional Facebook pages but these serve as the fundamental elements of running a brands’ Facebook fan page.

 

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