Smart Tips to Help You Master Facebook

For the time being Facebook is the 1000-pound gorilla in social media. There are 7.1 billion in the world and over 1.7 billion people are on Facebook. By far, Facebook has the largest market share of any social media platform. Although Mark Zuckerberg describes his company as a tech company, many are now arguing it’s a media company. Publishers are placing content on the platform, but Facebook is editorializing the content that is seen by its users. In other words, it’s doing what media companies have traditionally done.

Buzzsomo Findings: Buzzsomo released an article with their findings of a study on enhancing engagements on Facebook. Some of their findings include the following:

• Posts from Instagram boosted Facebook posts by 23 percent. FYI, Instagram is owned by Facebook.
• Posts on Sundays got the most engagement.
• Posts between 10PM and midnight also got the most engagement. Like the point above, this is probably because there are fewer posts to Facebook during these times.
• Posts without hashtags performed better than those with hashtags.
• Videos directly embedded into Facebook as opposed to those shared from a third-party platform such as YouTube were 6 times more likely to have engagements.

The fact of the matter is you have to stay on top of it on Facebook. There are some quick things you should do, to help keep your brand top of mind for your followers.

Profile Picture: This should be easy. However, sometimes brands think they can make a statement with their profile picture. That’s not what you want. Your profile picture should have your logo. When people are scrolling on their Facebook timeline, there will be a mental imprint of your logo, even if they don’t read your post or visit your page.

Cover photo: You want your cover photo to be of a high quality. Grainy photos don’t cut it. This is an opportunity to make a statement about your brand. Make it a point to have high-quality resolution for your photo image and brand that cover photo as well.

About: Maybe when you created your Facebook page, you wanted to get it up right away and said to yourself you would come back to this later. Make sure you completed your “About” section. Use the keywords associated with your brand. Also, make it a point to have a phone number, address, email and your website URL.

Calls to Action (CTA): Underneath the cover photo, you’ll find a blue “Add a Button” feature. This is an opportunity for you to create a call to action. Some of the CTAs include: Contact Us (email), Call Now, Send Message (within Facebook) or Watch Video. Don’t miss an opportunity on your page to invite people to do something with a CTA. You can link this call to action to your website.

Pin Posts: Use “Pin to Top” feature to pin a post to the top of your page. This is a great thing to do on a post that’s gotten a lot of traction or that you don’t want to get lost in the shuffle. Simply click the drop-down arrow on the upper right of a given post and click “Pin to Top”. Since you can only pin one post at a time, rotate posts you want to highlight.

Video Library: Video is where it’s at today. Create a library of videos so people can see your work live in action. Videos can be live streams and don’t have to be more than a minute or two long.

Schedule: I know it may seem time-consuming to manage social media. But it doesn’t have to be. There are plenty of free tools out there that make scheduling to Facebook easy. You can also schedule within Facebook. When you’re posting, hit the button to the right of the “Publish” button. That will allow you to schedule your posts for the week if you’d like.

Post Details: If you want to see the performance of individual posts (remember that you’re going to get a lot more traction by boosting your posts), click on the lower left of any post. By doing so, you’ll see the number of likes, shares, comments (including negative) and views.

Facebook is always tweaking its algorithms in an effort to remain dominant. That means, the best thing you can do is keep up with what’s happening related to Facebook so you can make adjustments.

Author of “Not Your Father’s Charity: How to Dominate Your Fundraising to Create Your Success” (Free Digital Download)

? 2016 Wayne Elsey and Not Your Father’s Charity. All Rights Reserved.