Written by ContentPowered.com
How do you post to your business page? How often, at what times, and about what topics? It’s possible that your quest to use social media to humanize your brand is backfiring. People like to see the human side of brands, but they don’t want to see your selfies or your pictures of business lunches. Here’s what not to do if you want to keep your Facebook page alive.
Posting Too Often About the Same Old News
Common wisdom holds that you should post frequently, and you should post on a consistent schedule. This is true, but it also matters what you post. If you’re out of ideas, it’s easy to relapse into posting about topics your users have seen. After all, if only 12% of your users see a post, posting it again should put it in front of a different 12%, right?
Unfortunately, you can’t post repeated messages and hope you get a different random selection of your users seeing it. The people who see your posts see them because they’re engaged with your brand. If they aren’t seeing the posts, posting again isn’t going to shot it to them. It’s just going to show it to the people who already saw it, and those people are going to wonder why you’re telling them about it yet again.
You can get away with posting about the same topic multiple times, as long as it’s a relevant current event. Posting about the start of a time-sensitive sale, posting about it being ongoing, and posting about its impending end are all valid posts, even if the sale is only one day long. The problem is when you start posting multiple times in the same day about something that’s neither time-sensitive nor new.
When you’re determining how often you should post in a day, you should also spend some time to determine what kinds of posts you’ll share each day. You should be sharing curated content, new blog content, images and even videos every day.
Posting about Topics Your Followers Don’t Want to Know
Once again, it all comes back to content. When I say you should post images, videos, curated content and the like, you have to keep it within reason. Just because you like video games, doesn’t mean you have permission to post about your favorite game on your social media account. Unless you’re a tech or gaming company, it’s unrelated to the majority interests of your population.
You also don’t want to post the kind of trite, nonsense content that is berated in public profiles. Don’t post about your morning commute, don’t post about your co-worker’s cold, don’t post about going out drinking on Friday night, don’t post about the latest celebrity gossip; it’s all best left to the people who care about that sort of thing. The people who follow your business page follow it because they want to know the news and deals relating to your company, not because they want to know about your CFO’s dog’s toothache.
Posting Haphazardly
Are you using a post scheduler? You really should be. Automation has its issues, but as long as you make sure you’re around to maintain engagement when the posts go live, you’ll probably be fine.
The problem with not automating or scheduling your posts is that you tend to only post when you feel up to posting. One of two things will happen. Either you’ll stop posting when you don’t have ideas, or you’ll sit and agonize for hours over the posts you need to make, both missing your deadline and posting half-assed content when you finally do post.
The first issue is the haphazard schedule. One of the biggest factors for maintaining reach on Facebook is always having a presence in your followers’ feeds. If you lapse for too long, you’ll lose that valuable space. Engagement will drop – because there are no posts to engage with – and consequently, so will your reach.
Write posts when you have inspiration and schedule them out, so you always have something to write. The same applies to your blog as well, so you should always have something new to post.
Posting Without Proofreading
Nothing is worse than trying to read a Facebook stats and finding ti full of errors. Every time you write a post, you should go over it at least once to make sure all of the words are the appropriate words, to make sure everything is spelled properly, to make sure the grammar is correct and to make sure it can’t be misinterpreted as something damaging. Every one of those issues can kill engagement on a post, and encountering those issues more than once in a short time can demolish the influence a Facebook page has.
Posting Trite, Outdated Content
There’s a fine line between bringing back content you’ve posted before, and posting boring reposted content.
If you have a handful of popular blog posts and you’ve shared them all before, it’s okay to share them again in a best-of roundup. This gives you a new wave of exposure from people who saw it before and didn’t get to read, or who read it before and want to share it again now.
On the other hand, if you have a slew of old blog posts that weren’t really all that popular, another round of promotion isn’t going to set things right. Rather than try to emphasize driving traffic to content that doesn’t magnetically attract it on its own, you should let those old posts be.
You also should avoid posting “news” when it’s not news. Weighing in on celebrity gossip days after it’s relevant is old news.
Be especially wary of memes. The right meme used at the right time can go incredibly viral, but if you’re trying to force that viral sensation, you’re going to come across as trying too hard. This is more true than ever in this era of Twitter, Tumblr and Reddit, where a meme can be born, live a day, and die a shameful death in the span of hours. It would be like me coming in to illustrate these points with scumbag steve or advice animals. It’s old and worn out; it just doesn’t work.
