Sunday, May 13, 2012

10 Tips For Posting On Your Facebook Fan Page

Facebook Post Targeting image from Bobby Owsinski's Music 3.0 blog
Facebook Post Targeting Example
Let's face it, you have a Facebook fan page for one reason - to connect with your fans. While I don't believe that there's a one-size-fits-all formula for how this is done, there are some suggestions on how to get not only the best fan engagement, but also to improve your "Edgerank."

What is Edgerank? It's a news feed formula that Facebook has created to determine which stories are the most relevant. The more popular the story, the more likely it will show up on people's news feed. What that means is you have to optimize your content in order to make sure that it will have a high relevancy, and as a result be seen by more people. It's sort of like organic SEO, but just for Facebook.

Here are 10 tips optimizing your Facebook content.

1. Don't Automate Your Status Updates. Automated content sometimes doesn't make it into users news feeds, and the same message across all social networks can result in a lower fan engagement (I'm guilty of this myself).

2. Show That Your Human. How? Thank you fans for their replies, and post things that are more personal occasionally.

3. Post More Photos And Videos. Photos and videos perform well on Facebook and are favorites of the news feed algorithm, but they also grab people's attention a lot more than text.

4. Put Your Fans In Charge Occasionally. Ask your fans questions. Let them decide which song will be the next single, or which video they like best, or the album cover artwork. They like to be involved and the news feed algorithm likes it as well.

5. Target Your Status Updates. If you have fans all over the world, most don't need to know about a local or regional gig or release. Target the appropriate posts as tightly as you can to the area necessary to get the word out (check out the post targeting example on the left).

6. Ask Questions. Posts that include a call to action get much better engagement than those that don't.

7. Watch You Post Frequency And Timing. Don't overwhelm you fans with too many posts. One or two a day seem to be the best frequency. I've written a lot about timing your posts in the past, and all studies prove that it's important.

8. Have A Consistent Voice. It's important that the voice remains relatively the same in all posts so the fans don't get confused and concentrate on the voice more than the message.

9. Diversify Your Content. A combination of how-to's, artist or band trivia, breaking news, polls, fill-in-the-blanks, photos and videos, or third party content keeps it interesting.

10. Track The Performance Of Your Posts. Watch for trends and feedback/comments from your fans and adjust your posts as needed.

Just to be clear, the tips in this post are from an article by Ekatrina Walter of Intel's Social Media Center for Excellence. I've modified it a bit for the music space, but the points are still hers.

I know that your thinking that this is yet one more thing to consider when posting, but if you're doing it right, it shouldn't take much extra time. Just keep the 10 tips in the forefront of your mind when composing your Facebook post, and the rest should take care of itself.

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