When you are the admin of a Facebook page you view the world’s largest social network differently to non-admins and this can lead you to making some fundamental mistakes in your social media marketing.
1. Users Look At My Business Page
This is the most fundamental issue that many Page Admin’s never get to grips with, even though a user has liked your page this does not mean that they will visit your page on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. In fact, having liked your page they may never visit the page again. A Page Admin will regularly check their own page either on desktop or mobile to see what activity has taken place. Normal users do not behave in this way, they generally look for content in their newsfeed to click on.
A Page Admin will read lots of material online about the importance of your cover image and making sure that your business page “looks right” and these articles often give the impression that a good cover image is one of the most important parts of your page. In some ways it is, because it will tend to be the first thing a user sees when they visit your page. However, having liked your page the user is only likely to click on status updates in their timeline and not come back to the page.
This leads page owners into the mistake of thinking that because they’ve not posted for a while they are OK because “When I look at my business page I can see all my key messages are on the page”. The reality is that you need to keep your company or brand in the forefront of your fans thoughts and you will need to send out compelling content on a regular basis to achieve this.
2. Users Are Online During Business Hours
The other common mistake that Page Admin’s make is to post their content during working hours. This makes sense to the Page Admin as it is part of their work to complete for the day, but is it when the users who have liked your page are online?
Most Facebook users are online and most active between 20:00-23:00. If you post your material at 10:30 in the morning where do you think it will appear in a user’s timeline who opens Facebook at 20:00? That’s right, way down the page and the lower down the page it is the fewer clicks it will get. Remember, you are already competing with the user’s friends for their attention and nowadays everybody wants their information now. What would you be most interested in reading, the update that your best friend just posted about the argument they had today or a publicity message from your company that was posted 8 hours ago?
Try to target your messages to go out when your users are most likely to be online. This will help you to increase the level of engagement that your posts generate. There are plenty of tools such as Hoot Suite that can help you to schedule your messages in advance. However, bear in mind that your content may provoke a response so ensure that there is a way that you can monitor responses to your content even when you are not at work. Facebook provides the excellent Facebook Pages Manager and it is available for free on both iOS and Android.
Social media has changed the way many of us communicate with our friends but also with companies as well. We have already reached the point where companies realise that a good website is an asset to their business and many are only starting to see the rewards that are available from having an active social media presence. Too many businesses dip their toe into social media, try it for a couple of months and then say that there was no value in it for them. What they really mean is “We made some fundamental mistakes that we didn’t even realise we’d made and so have given up on social media”. By making note of the two points in this article you will have taken a small step to social media success.