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How to improve your most important Facebook page metrics?
In the last blog and podcast, I told you about 3 important metrics of your Facebook page that define your success. In this blog, let's look at how you can improve these metrics.
Improving reach of your Facebook page
Even though the benchmark of organic reach of a Facebook page is pretty low at 5%, it is important to meet that target. Reach of a post is the number of people who have seen your post in their feed. You are not only competing with other pages that the user is following, but also with the many friends of that user.
Hence, my first tip is to make your posts more human. Facebook prioritizes the posts from friends in the user's feed. If your page post is going to evoke an emotion, Facebook is likely to add your post to the user's feed as well. See the example below from a page I managed. This is a simple post which celebrates the team behind the magazine. Yet, the reach of this post was more than the average post reach for the page. What was more interesting was that this post repeated on the page every two months. Despite that, the post had the best reach of about 20% every time.
Facebook wants the users to stay on it's platform. If your posts contain an external link, Facebook is likely to suppress that post from user's feeds. My second tip is to post native media. When using images in your post, add them to the post, rather than sharing a link in the post. When posting a video, upload it to the page first and then use it in the post. In this example below, the video was uploaded on the Facebook page which increased it's reach. Also note that the post is invoking an emotion in the user to take part in the celebration. Both these factors contributed to the increased reach, which was 36% of the followers.
Facebook page insights tell you when your fans are online as seen in the image below. You can experiment with posting days and times to see when you reach is greatest. Hovering over the day of the week will change the time graph below to show you online data for that day. If you are starting out and do not have access to this data, then think about your ideal customer. What do they do? What time are they likely to be spending time on Facebook? As a general rule, most people check their Facebook on their weekday commute, lunch breaks and before sleeping.
Improving engagement of your posts
The tips for increasing reach also apply to increasing the engagement. But, there are 2 more tips to have an engaged audience.
Facebook provides insights on which type of your posts do well. This is available under Insights - > Posts -> Post Types. Here you will see the average reach and engagement for Video posts, Image posts, Link posts, Status posts and Other posts. Knowing which type of posts your audience prefers, you can create more of the same. For example, if your audience prefers video posts over images, then create a slideshow of the multiple images that you were going to post.
Did you know that you can choose the audience for each of your post? This is a great way to laser focus your post to the audience to whom it is most relevant. In the example below, I was posting about a children's story for ages 5 to 10. I selected the age of the parent who are interested in reading and showed the post to them. You could also restrict the post by gender and location. Targeting your posts will signify to Facebook that you know your audience and are publishing relevant posts. If you have never used this option before, you can enable it from Settings -> General -> Audience Optimization for Posts. Creating a targeted posts can be done through Publishing Tools -> Create.
Adding more followers to your page
While reach and engagement are good metrics to measure the relevance of your posts to the audience, getting your posts in front of new people is an important aspect of your marketing. How do you add more followers to your page without buying likes? There are 3 ways.
When you run an ad for your page, people will like your post. Facebook allows you to invite those people to like your page as shown in the image below. This is a good way to get more followers who know about you and are interested in what you offer.
Posting often is key to increasing your followers. Follow a schedule to post, rather than posting ad-hoc. Pages with good posting activity are recommended to people who like pages similar to yours. Create a plan in a format that suits you. In the example below, I made the schedule in MS Excel. Knowing the schedule, I created the posts for an entire month at a time!
And finally, mix up your posts to post a variety of content that are relevant to your brand. When you post something share-worthy, your follower's re-post may attract new likes.
Improving your brand awareness through Facebook need not be a challenge if you follow these tips. Keep posting great quality content that is relevant to your followers and you will improve your metrics easily.
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