Your fans have feeds overflowing with content and it’s hard to get your page’s posts in front of them as a result. But there are ways to stand out and improve the probability of appearing in their feeds in the first place.
These 6 ways will make your posts more unique both from the perspective of your fans as well as by Facebook itself.
To elaborate on the latter, you can leverage Facebook’s algorithms to your advantage. The reason to do this is because of the organic reach of posts, where Facebook normally only displays them to roughly 30% of your fans.
1. Native Video:
Facebook wants to maintain its social media dominance. This means beating new video-centric social media platforms like Snapchat. To achieve this, they have weighted their algorithms so native videos are visible in user feeds more frequently than other post types. Videos are also larger than other post types helping to grab a fan’s attention.
In the picture below you can see the difference in sizing between videos hosted on Facebook itself and offsite videos hosted on YouTube etc.
2. Business Milestones
An often overlooked feature of pages is the ability to add milestones to your page. As a result of the feature being neglected it has not been overused and is a means of reaching your fans in a way that is going to stand out in their feeds.
3. Native Content:
External links are great, but 80% of Facebook usage occurs on mobiles. This means load times are a key consideration as they create friction when a fan tries to consume your external content. One solution is to post anything less than 350 words on Facebook itself.
4. Scheduling:
The benefit of scheduling posts cannot be overestimated. It can be done via your page’s dashboard or it can be done with a 3rd party service such asHootsuite. The benefit of using a service like Hootsuite is that it is able to determine the best time to post content. Whereas if you choose to do scheduling manually you will have to decide this for yourself. You can do this through a combination of trial and error as well as analysis of your page’s insights.
The reason scheduling is effective is because content is not posted in a continuous stream and users are not always on Facebook. As a result, you can find the optimal time to post where the least amount of content is being posted and the most amount of users are online.
I would recommend initially scheduling your posts between 10 AM and 2 PM. But, the optimal time is dependent on your industry. You may find better results for example as a cafe reaching your customers between 7-9 AM & 11-1 PM. If you own a cafe or similar business you want to reach your fans when they have intent to buy e.g. looking to buy a morning coffee.
Also, if your fans are international a reasonable time to post here may be the early hours of the morning there.
5. Social Media Optimisation:
Businesses often overlook optimising their website’s content for social media sharing. When you or a 3rd party share a link on Facebook, a preview is automatically created.
However, without proper optimisation the data is still sourced from the link provided. But the preview is created from text and imagery not designed for sharing. Optimisation allows you to control all the data that Facebook uses to create a more professional appearance.
Without, you get this kind of result, in this case, a customer has shared a website and an opportunity has been missed to control the message and the branding. In addition, it does not stand out like the one above.
6. Promotional Offers:
Another underused feature is the ability to offer fans a discount on one or more products. Just go to create a post for your page, and switch the post type to offer, enter your offer and link to where they can claim it.
The key here is to not over complicate the execution. Create a blog post or page on your website with an offer code like “2015firesale”. Then just ask them to quote this offer code over the phone, in person or via your contact form.
Conclusion:
These are just some of the ways your page can stand out. If your Facebook page is not meeting up with your expectations adopting one or more of these ideas will help.
Have a question? Please head over to the AIC Technologies Facebook page and ask away!
