#153 - 10 Ways to Use Facebook - the Way It Really Works!

According to a recent report from Buddy Media, Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm determines what shows up in users' News Feeds. In order to optimize your Facebook activity to get seen in News Feeds more often, which is obviously going to help with traffic, you’ve got to be diligent and creative.

The thousands of companies who follow the “Field of Dreams” (if you build it, they will come) theory of social media management have learned the hard way that this is merely a dream – it results in zero engagement and a very weak Fan Base.

Here are 10 tips proven to work:

1. Ask plenty of questions (it’s free consumer research)
2. Employ questions, trivia, drawings and contests.
3. Interact with your fans; let no comment/post go unnoticed!
4. Incorporate apps (use that question key, polls, DEALS and coupons).
5. Incorporate more photos and videos.
6. Talk about what’s in the news (relate to what people are talking about).
8. Imply a sense of urgency with time-sensitive material and well planned campaigns.
9. Include links in every status update – so your fans can hit that “share” button!
10. Be explicit in your updates (generic and general get you nowhere).

It's your Fans' page - not yours
By applying yourself and investing in the human capital necessary to create and maintain a robust Facebook presence, you’ll find that just like America’s top brands you can generate more business and engagement by using your corporate Facebook page wisely.

Enjoy your Social Media Life!

Socially Yours,
Elizabeth

#130 - Facebook Fan Pages: The Results

In one of the first large-scale studies of Facebook pages ever conducted, Toronto-based Sysomos analyzed and investigated usage patterns on nearly 600,000 Facebook pages.

The results included information on various aspects including popularity, amount of content posted, number of fans and categories. This is a study of interest for anyone who manages Facebook Fan pages or plans to create one.

Here are a few highlights:

• On average, a Facebook Page has 4,596 fans.

• Four percent of pages have more than 10,000 fans, 0.76% of pages have more than 100,000 fans, and 0.05% of pages (or 297 in total) have more than a million fans.

• Pages with more than one million fans have nearly three times as much owner-generated content as the average Facebook page. (Where “owner-generated content” means things like photos, videos, and links posted by the page’s administrators.)

• Pages with more than a million fans have nearly 60 times as much fan-generated content (photos, videos) as the average Facebook page.

• On an average Facebook Page, the administrators create one wall post every 15.7 days. Among pages with more than a million fans, one wall post is created for every 16.1 days. This suggests that wall post frequency shares no correlation with a page’s popularity.

• Overall, the most popular “category” for Facebook pages is “non-profits,” while “celebrities,” “music” and “products” are the most popular categories among pages with more than a million fans.

There is much more to glean from the study. Find it all here.

The point is that major engagement on a Facebook fan page (as with any other community) takes work. Often, an administrator (or community manager) is charged with creating the bulk of the content. Facebook may be the most amazing social network on the planet with more than 350 million members, but don’t let that number fool you. People are not knocking down the door to get to your new fan page.

Life Lesson: Success always takes time and hard work.