5 tips for more engaging Facebook content
You’ve created a Facebook Page for your brand or organisation and quickly realised that it can be incredibly time-consuming to post content, let alone post content that drives the business results you’re after. These 5 tips will help you to better plan and create your content to increase engagement or meet your other social media and Facebook objectives.
1. Know your audience
I say this so often I must sound like a broken record, but community management is about people so the first rule of any online engagement is to know your audience. And who knows your audience best? YOU DO! So rather than looking at what everyone else is doing, look inward. Reflect on what’s worked well to date and if in doubt, ask them what they’d like to see. Facebook’s analytics (Insights) is free and a wealth of information – so keep an eye on what’s going on in your data to track audience engagement.
2. Know your brand
Following on from point 1, as much as you know your audience best, you also know your brand best. What resources do you have access to that you can harness within your organisation (including other people)? What can you use to incentivise your audience? What news, events, existing content and so on can you repurpose for Facebook? Who are your key stakeholders and what are they up to. What are traditional marketing and PR teams up to and is there anything happening there you can leverage? You might feel like you’re on your own a lot of the time, but if you start engaging people within the organisation, you’ll find endless concepts for content.
3. Content is King
This is not news. Don’t limit yourself to thinking content is just visuals and video – most community managers have a plethora of content at their fingertips, but they just don’t realise it. What content and articles do you have on your website? How can you repurpose them for Facebook? Do you have an agency creating other marketing materials? If yes, make it so that they’re creating Facebook-appropriate graphics along with any other campaign materials. What sort of things is your community already talking about? Harness all of this and use it to your advantage.
4. Reuse & recycle
Had a post that worked great last week? Switch it up a little and post again in 2 weeks. Your audience is larger than the reach of a single Facebook post, so you’ll reach more unique viewers by posting on different days of the week and at different times. The shelf-life of a Facebook post is about 3 hours, so once it drops off the newsfeed it’s no longer reaching your audience. You can also put a seasonal spin on something and plan to post something similar quarterly or even annually. Which brings me to the last point…
5. Plan, plan plan
There’s nothing worse than the pressure of having to come up with something to post last-minute, and this is usually when something flops. Or goes viral. But it usually only goes viral because it’s a funny meme, and not because it’s doing anything to achieve your business objectives. You NEED an editorial plan. Create a long-range quarterly or annual roadmap highlighting seasonal events, public holidays and major campaigns. Then create weekly to fortnightly content plans with the copy, urls, images and anything else you need included. Then you can schedule posts or rest assured that should you suddenly not be available, there’s content to move forward with. Sitting down to plan content once a week will save you a lot of time, and your content will work harder as it’s more well-considered.
So there you have it – 5 fairly simple things you should be able to start doing within the next week to make your Facebook content work for you. Don’t forget:
- Audience
- Brand
- Content
- Reuse & recycle
- Planning
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