Written by ContentPowered.com
Facebook is touted as being a source of a lot of traffic and customer benefit, all for free. The reality is, it’s not really free; you have to invest either a lot of time or a little money and a little time to find success. If your budget for Facebook is low, expect to spend plenty of time getting it to work for you.
If you have a Facebook page and you’re wondering why it isn’t working, isn’t bringing in new customers, isn’t engaging your fans, check these common problems.
You Have No Followers
Facebook is contingent on having people following your page. If no one follows your page, no one is around to read your posts. If no one sees your posts, no one clicks your link to your website. There are any number of reasons why you might not have any followers, many of which are covered below. Suffice it to say you’re going to need to do everything in your power to gather up legitimate, interested users to follow your page if you want any success on Facebook.
You Aren’t Posting Often Enough
One of the key elements to getting your posts seen by users is engagement. When users engage with your posts, they see your posts more often. What does this have to do with post frequency? When you post less often, there are fewer chances for users to engage with your brand. If no one has engage with your brand recently, the chances of them seeing your posts will be pretty low. The less you post, the less people see your posts, and the less your posts are shared. Try to post at least once a day, every day.
You’re Posting Too Much Crap
The flip side of the coin, if you’re posting frequently, is that you may be posting content no one cares about. Constant minor internal updates about your office politics are pretty worthless. Updates about who your CEO is meeting and why that’s important on a B2B perspective can be good, but only if you’re marketing B2B on Facebook. It’s no good for B2C relationships.
If you’re curating content, make sure that content is compelling and valuable. You can’t just share anything that comes into view, not if you expect to keep on the good side of your users.
You’re Too Advertorial
Facebook is on a crusade against advertising in your organic posts. There’s a place for advertising, and that’s through Facebook’s PPC advertising platform. If you’re posting advertorial content, you’re posting against the rules Facebook has established. This means Facebook may remove your posts or punish your page. It also means that the average user is going to be more averse to following your page. Users don’t like subscribing to commercials; they want content of real value.
You’ve Been Flagged as Spam
This one occasionally happens if you’ve posted the same message numerous times, or if the content you post leads to sites that look like spam sites. If enough users flag your content as originating from a spam site, or as bearing the hallmarks of spam, Facebook will take a look. If they agree, your page will be penalized for being spam page. In this case, you’ll be lucky if you aren’t removed entirely.
You’re Too New
Pages take a while to get going. Building your first hundred followers will take a while. Building your first thousand will take longer still. At some point you’ll reach critical mass and you’ll be able to convert your leverage into business benefit, but that point isn’t easy to reach. You need to give it time, while enacting positive strategies throughout the rest of your marketing.
You Haven’t Gone Public
This is a rare one, but we see it occasionally. Page Admins are able to hide their page from public viewing, typically while they make major changes or prepare a site for launch. You might have hidden your page to clean up spam, or forgotten to make your page public when you went live. If no one can find your page, it does you no good.
You’re Not Doing Any Promotion
Facebook is not a passive source of value. You need to put a lot of work into getting it out there, in front of your users. This means promotion, how ever you choose to promote. You might send it out in a special message to your email subscribers. You might add a Facebook page signature to your emails. You might add social sharing buttons to your website. You might go all-in with word of mouth advertising. You might run PPC ads, both on Facebook and through Google.
The point is, you need to promote your page if you want users to find it. Only once you reach a certain critical threshold does your page become self-sustaining, where posts being shared puts them in front of enough other people that they further grow.
You’re Too Obviously Automated
Automation can be helpful, but if all your Facebook feed is doing is reposting the messages you scheduled on Twitter, complete with hashtags, you’re doing automation wrong. It’s incredible detrimental to look like your page is managed by a robot. No one will engage, because they can’t expect a response. No one will follow, because they can just check your website occasionally to see anything they missed. Proper automation is great; bad automation is a page killer.
You’re Ignoring Engagement
What do you do when a user comments on a post you made? Do you add a response? Do you go out of your way to respond as quickly as possible, or do you wait until the next time you sign on to reply? The proper way is to set up alerts to let you know when a user comments, so you can thank them for their comment or respond in a valuable, insightful way.
You’re Ignoring Multimedia
If you had to guess, which types of posts would you assume get the most engagement and bring the most value to your business? The answer, believe it or not, is images and videos. Users love images, and video on Facebook is quickly becoming as big or bigger than YouTube. Multimedia is essential to the success of a modern Facebook page. There’s just no valid substitute.
