Considerations for effective Facebook use.
Introduction.
All brands want a viral Facebook post, they want their news to hit every national newspaper and they want their posts on Facebook or Twitter to be shared or retweeted by millions. It’s the golden ticket. A viral post can catapult a business to superstar status but how do you tell what is a great post and what’s a damp squib?
Posts rarely go viral without any help. They are usually boost through Facebook advertising or they’re sent to popular news sites such as Huffington Post or Buzzfeed (who then promote the posts if needed), however, you can save time, and money, by determining which posts are likely to gain the most traction in the least amount of time.
Engagement.
Engagement is the measure of any successful social media post while clicks, views and shares are the currency. Consider Shares as the £50 notes, Comments as the £20 notes, Clicks and Likes as the £10 notes and Views as the £1 coins.
The key to a great post is the engagement. How many people are commenting, liking, and sharing your post? How can you tempt them to like and share your posts?
Research your own history.
If you’ve been on social media a while, you will have a history. You’ll be able to see, through a Facebook advertising account, or through your page’s settings, which posts have been the most popular. Ignore the views, look at the clicks, the comments. Is there a way you could have kept the comments rolling? Could that post have been better with a little more investment? What was it about that post that made it more popular than the rest? Was it a text, an image or a video?
Boost a few posts.
If you don’t have a history you can look at a close competitor to see which of their posts perform the best. Of course you won’t have access to their financials so you won’t be able to tell if a more popular post was simply that because more money was spent.
You can also boost a few of your own posts, to obtain the answers you need. This doesn’t have to be an expensive process as once you have the engagement you can easily scale it.
Don’t stop the momentum.
A good Facebook post can be great if you keep the conversation flowing. Talk to the people who comment on it, ask them questions, keep them talking. Every time they comment, their friends see your post in their newsfeed. This is why engagement is so valuable.
Sometimes, not often, a post will go viral without anyone knowing why. Usually there’s a good marketing team or PPC agency behind a viral post. It’s easier for a post to gain popularity if it isn’t selling a product or service, but this is the job of your social media manager, to be inventive.
When twitter began it quickly climbed to fame as the portal for celebrities to tell their fans their everyday thoughts. People signed up hoping to gain insights into their favourite celebrity’s world, feeling as if a little stardust was actually rubbing off on them.
As celebrities would take the time to re-tweet or interact with the fans, their fan bases grew and they proved that this form of Social Media is perfect for pitching a product.
Celebrities are after all business people at heart, without the interest of their fans (customers) no one would watch the movie, see the TV show or buy their album. Inadvertently they proved that interaction is the way forward to win the hearts of the nation.
Now businesses sign up on an hourly basis hoping to generate the same amount of followers, as they gain a wider audience they find that their local business can become national, whilst their little shop can become a huge online success.
The biggest companies have this down to a fine art and usually employ a person to manage their online social networking; however there are things the smaller business can learn from how they tweet.