Since people expect to find a Facebook page, regardless of your line of business, you should certainly construct a polished page with valuable and relevant information pertaining to your audience.
As of the first quarter of 2018, Facebook had 2.19 billion monthly active users. It will take effort, and creative content to ensure your business is noticed among a sea of competition. However, with time and trial-and-error practice, you can standout against others in your niche. We are here to help you do just that.
Scheduling posts for your Facebook page in advance is a worthwhile plan. I typically do this for clients one month at a time in advance once a month. Why is it not advisable to plan more than one month in advance? It is important to do this regularly in order to dig deeper into Facebook insights as well as to understand and monitor the page. This will provide you with information on what your audience likes, the times of the day that work best, and what style of content works better. Furthermore, Facebook insights gives you a good understanding of the type of content that generates “click-throughs”, and the content that doesn’t perform well.
In order to see and understand these important pieces of information, it is important to read your analytics. It all comes down to A/B testing. Even though you may appear to know your audience, it doesn’t mean that your audience won’t change. In fact, you will notice changes as your page continues to grow. Moreover, Facebook is constantly tweaking the algorithm that decides how your content is distributed your followers. Therefore, as an online marketer, it is necessary to constantly remain on your toes, analyzing your content and understanding platform changes.
Social media operates in real time. Facebook, much like Twitter and Instagram, is constantly being updated with new information. As such, the lifecycle of updates and content is short.
Creating a schedule allows you to remain active and engaged with your fans. If you are a small to medium size business, start with ten posts. That will keep you active and in the forefront of your customers.
Calendar and Post Engagement:
- Time Sensitive Content– Events, holidays, and product launches, can be planned ahead of time and marked on your calendar. For example: In June, Father’s day is the third Sunday of the month. This is easy to mark and plan. Work the rest of your posts for the month around this, or any other event.
- Analytics & Past Schedule– Keep a calendar, Google Calendar in Gmail is an easy solution. This gives you a point of reference for later. You can review the days you posted, the month, or even two months, prior. This helps tremendously with understanding your page and how it develops over time.
- 4-1-1 Rule– This topic has been discussed a lot lately by social media strategists. You should post four educational and entertaining posts for every one “soft promotion” and every one “hard promotion”. Your fans, current, or potential customers, don’t want to be continuously bombarded with sales. If you do this, they will likely unfollow you. There is a right way and a wrong way to promote. Keep reading for more details.
- Consistency of Publishing– The frequency at which you publish is important. On social media it is important that you stay active. If you do not remain active, it is likely that your fans will unfollow you. We will show you some sample calendars we use with clients. In order to maximize engagement, you want to keep your page fresh and lively.
The core foundation of a successful Facebook page is content. You will hear that content is “king”, but your content does not carry much weight if it is not consistently published for your audience.
Creating Content Balance
- 10% promotions for your business
- 60% curated content from outside sources (minus content from your competitors)
- 30% in-house developed content OR simple engagement posts
If we use the 10-post guideline your content schedule might look like this:
- 5 posts using content from other sources
- 3 posts using unique content developed by you OR audience engagement posts
- 2 status updates
After your initial ten posts, you can insert one promotional post.
Producing regular content without continuous creation try to use tidbits of text like this:
- “One little-known way to…” (the “hidden gem” statement)
- “Caption this…”
- “Fill in the blank”
- Multiple Choice: Ask a question/make a statement. Give two or more options as a response, and ask your audience to “‘Like’ for Option 1, ‘Share’ for Option 2″ etc.
- Try to spark nostalgia
- Think resonation
- Use the psychological effect of the added “because” clause to a request. Rather than simply asking someone to do a task, add a “because” statement. Give them a reason to do what you want them to do.
Getting More Personal
To add a more personal touch to your posts, either announce who does your social media, or simply reply with initials or first name.
Curating 101:
When curating content from other sources, don’t just hit the SHARE button. You don’t want to bring other comments onto the page. In addition, this gives you the opportunity to change the content you’re sharing to fit the culture of your page. Important note: some content may not curate correctly.
(Example) of Article Picture / Your Picture
Photo Solution:
Although utilizing your team and real people as much as possible is ideal, it’s not always possible. Consider signing up for adobestock.com. The subscriptions range from $29 a month and up depending on usage, and will be worth your while if you are running a social media campaign on Facebook. Best of all, you will look professional.
Video Solution:
Creating simple videos with text and images can easily be done with no skill at all. Try a place like: Animoto.
The cloud-based video–tool Animoto is perfectly suited to the creation of professional videos in a short time. It’s our favourite!
Image Creation:
There are many image creating softwares out there like: Banner Snack, Canva, Pixlr, just to name a few.
How much is Too Much?
If you are serious about managing your page, and have more than enough content to post, here’s a general guideline:
- 2x a day is optimal.Don’t over do it, because you will end up losing fans.
- Shoot for 10-15 posts a month if you are a small to medium sized business. You may also space your posts 2-3 days a part.
- Don’t go 5-7 days without a post.Remember there are over 30 million ACTIVE business pages on Facebook, so you have to stay engaged with the network to keep the followers you acquired, and continue to continue gain new ones.
- Posting once per day. You need to plan the frequency to fit your schedule.
Content Tip: Make sure you include a variety within your posts. For example, including content such as: articles, pictures, infographics and humour keeps your fans engaged and your content from going stale.
When is best time to post?
8am – 11 am
12 am – 3pm
4pm – 11pm
Many social media strategists claim certain times of the day work better. Googling “Best Times to Post On Facebook”, will show a variety of answers from 1pm, to evenings, or Saturdays, but trial and error will show the best times to post for your audience.
Advice: Study your insights and analytics. Do A/B tests throughout the month at variable times; see what works best, and what doesn’t. Just because one post worked at 5pm doesn’t mean it always will. Keep this in mind with any and all scheduling you do.
Best Tools for Organization:
You can use an application, like Buffer or Hootsuite, to schedule your posts, but Facebook also allows you to schedule posts directly on their platform. Unless you are using all social media channels, you should stick to using Facebook to schedule all your posts.
Finally, if you are struggling to maintain your presence on social media, consider hiring a social media management team. However, before you do, make sure they understand Facebook and how it works in comparison to other social media outlets, like Instagram and Twitter. Just because they offer the service doesn’t mean they are experts. We have successfully managed many pages and used analytics to effectively change posting times, and types of content shared.
