Facebook Timeline is coming to brand pages on 30th March and, as I mentioned in a previous post ‘Facebook Timeline for Business: What’s New?’, there is more emphasis now on posting decent content to encourage more interaction with fans. As always with Facebook it’s all about engaging people. If you post dull content that nobody interacts with, you will end up not being able to reach them because you won’t appear in their feed. The focus now is really getting your fans to:
- like your posts
- comment on your posts
- share your posts
- vote in your polls
If people do not interact with the content you post in the above ways then you will cease to appear in their newsfeed. And obviously if they hide your posts visbility then you won’t either. You will however still appear in their ticker feed (top right corner of your page) but you will not be visible to their wider networks.
So what should you do?
You need to take a fresh look at what you post and how it relates to your audience. Go back to the roots of your social media strategy and answer the following questions:
- Who are your audience / target market?
- What are they interested in?
- What does your organisation do/offer/talk about that they will want to share?
- What times of day and days of the week are they online (and interact most with what you post)?
When you’ve answered the questions above you should have a better idea of how to engage the right people at the right time. If your frequency of posts has been low you will probably need to increase the amount of times you post (once a day is apparently not considered to be enough anymore) to make any kind of impact.
You will certainly be wise to look at the times and days that you post in particular. If your audience are online more at the weekend and you work Mon-Fri, you should schedule a higher frequency of posts over the weekend. By using the metrics available to you with Facebook Insights and services like Bit.ly you can monitor this and adjust your social activity accordingly.
As for who your audience is and what they are interested in, that is obviously unique to your brand or industry.
Another way of utilising Facebook Timeline and creating interesting content is to build the history of your brand by posting historical milestones or important moments in time. Red Bull have tried this approach and have created an interesting chronology of their brand for their audience. Food for thought perhaps!
Time to get your thinking caps on. Comment on this post or on Twitter and share your ideas!