If you’re in need of a breather from social media, then you’d do well to listen to this episode of Marcus Brigstocke’s The Brig Society.
To those sceptical of social media, the sad fact is that it is one of the best ways to grow an audience and get your content noticed. Prime among them is Facebook, which, although not the most user-friendly or trendy platform, is by far the most successful at content promotion. So here’s our five-step guide to making it work for you.
1. Setting up a company page
First off, you’ll need to decide on the character of your page – whether, for instance, it will be informative, light-hearted, personal or corporate. Part of this process may even include establishing your brand values and the appropriate tone of voice this entails. Setting up a company page is easy, but make sure that you share administration rights with the correct people, who should be fully briefed in your notes on tone of voice.
2. What type of content?
The above neatly leads into the issue of what type of content you should share. For instance, if you have created a separate vehicle like a blog or digital magazine for your content, then you might think twice about positioning that next to sales-like material on your Facebook page. There are no hard and fast rules, but it’s probably best you are still consistent.
If you are publishing to several sites, including LinkedIn and Twitter, as well as Facebook, tools such as Buffer and HootSuite can help automate the process.
3. Stick to a schedule and think ads
Bombarding users with content upon your page’s launch might sound like a sound strategy, but you run two risks: overloading people so they ignore you, and looking stupid when you soon run out of good content to share. The best strategy is to stagger your content and create a schedule that you can realistically follow. Wash and repeat.
You might also want to think about using Facebook Ads, which allows you to promote your best content to the audiences Facebook thinks will follow you. Given the volume of business pages on Facebook, this might be the only realistic option to growing an audience.
4. Think images and straightforward headlines
If you want to promote your stories with images, be sure to use pictures that seduce readers, rather than put them off. As a rule, you should avoid visual cliches and choose interesting images that will marry well with does-what-it-says-on-the-tin type headlines.
5. Be patient
Following the above steps won’t lead you to overnight success, so you do have to be patient when creating your audience. But that doesn’t mean sitting back either. Go out and actively target people to follow and use other sites such as LinkedIn and Twitter to promote your Facebook page. And if your content is published on a blog, for instance, be sure to include a Facebook social button linking back to your page.
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