New guest author! Shaun Dakin is a good friend and an old hand at social media, and today he comes to us with a message some may find counter-intuitive. Ignore his words at your peril, though! This post first appeared on the Dakin & Associates blog.
Many organizations and brands spend a lot of time obsessing over their homepages, their landing pages, and their check out or donation pages. Thousands of dollars is spent on usability testing, focus groups, designers, committee meetings, and testing testing testing.
Awesome.
Do that. All of that. Your organization’s website is your welcome page to prospects, existing customers and members, and the media. It has to be good. It has to speak to your audience. It has to convert prospects into customers or viewers into donors.
Doesn’t your Facebook page – your “home” page on Facebook – deserve the same level of attention and focus? After all, that is where the over 1 Billion Facebook users will go to find you, right?
Coke’s Facebook Page
Wrong.
The fact is, most of your Facebook fans and people who don’t even “like” you will never see your Facebook homepage. Coke has 80 million fans on Facebook. I’m one of them. I hardly ever see their content. Ever.
Instead, fans will see you in their Facebook newsfeed.
Here is my newsfeed using BuzzFeed as an example. I see BuzzFeed’s content in MY newsfeed on Facebook NOT by going the BuzzFeed Facebook page. In fact, I NEVER go to the BuzzFeed Facebook page.
Do you know where I see most of my BuzzFeed content (as do you)? From my friends and family in my newsfeed !
Facebook Newsfeed example with Buzzfeed
If they see your content at all.
But.. I hear you say. Won’t my customers or members click over to MyAwesomeFacebookPage just to check out all of our amazing content? We have great photos, content, videos, articles, and photos of cute babies ! They must want to see all that stuff, right?
Nope. No. (well hardly ever, and not enough to spend a lot of time worrying about it).
So, what should you care about ?
Content, Content and Content.
Facebook only shows your amazing content to about 10% (if you are good) of your Facebook fans.
10%.
If you are good. If you are not so good, then you will have a hard time getting any of your fans to see much of your content.
What you can do.
OK, OK. I get it, people see our posts in their news feed.
What can you do to get them to see more of my awesome stuff?
- Post amazing unique content that people WANT to share.
- Post OPC (see below)
- Buy Facebook ads (awesome, if done correctly and more on this in another post I’ll do later this week).
Posting amazing unique content that people want to share is great but HARD and EXPENSIVE. Disney can do it. Can you?
Instead, do this:
POST OTHER PEOPLE’S CONTENT (OPC). Most importantly, post OPC that is working and you know it is working on Facebook with a similar audience.
The best thing about this? Those Other People LOVE it when you do that (give them credit of course) and you will have a nearly endless source of content your fans will love and appreciate.
Bottom line? Facebook will only show your content if people engage (like, share, comment) with your posts. If you don’t get any engagement, you won’t get your information into your fans newsfeed.
Why? Because Facebook is not going to share your boring content with their users.
Let me know what you think works?
BONUS TOOL:
If you really want to know what is working on Facebook right NOW you need to get something called CrowdTangle. CrowdTangle allows you to see and to know what is “going viral” right now on Facebook across ALL of Facebook or simply in the category that you really care about.
[…] others and from our own past performance if we want to get the most out of our Facebook pages. As Shaun Dakin wrote on epolitics.com, the most important thing about your Facebook Page is the quality of your wall posts. Nothing else […]