Written by ContentPowered.com
Much of what is written on this blog – and on other, similar blogs – is centered around gaining an audience on Facebook and other social media sites. The steps you can take to draw in new users, both from on and off the platform, are covered widely. What you don’t see as much of is the issue of retention. Getting users is one thing; keeping them around to be engaged and targeted is another. Are you driving away your fans? Make sure you aren’t making any of these mistakes.
Dial Back the Automation
Automation is highly valuable when you have limited time and a lot of work to do. There’s a reason, though, that most of the places automation is most valuable are the least visible. It’s great for scheduling posts, automatically generating meta titles and other menial tasks. It’s not so great for vomiting posts up on your Facebook Page. Social media requires that you be social, which in turn requires that you be present and available to interact on your platform. If you’re automating your posts, users know. They’ll slowly stop clicking, stop commenting and stop sharing. Eventually, they realize they’re essentially following a robot page and will rescind their like. Bring a few more personal touches to your posts to avoid the visible robot symptom.
Avoid Too Much Overt Promotion
Most users follow your Page for one of a few reasons. They may have liked you for a contest entry. They may follow you because of the giveaways you post. They may follow you for the value you bring in your posts. What they never follow you for are your promotional posts. They know you’re trying to sell something; that’s why you have a Page. If that’s all you’re doing, they aren’t going to follow you for long. Avoid overtly sales-focused talk and posts. They’re fine when used sparingly, but if a user sees more than one on their feed in a given period – how long depends on their personal preferences – they’re going to grow irritated. Irritated fans don’t click your links, they ignore your posts. Some may block your posts. Some will go all the way and unlike your page.
Don’t Worry Too Much about Peak Hours
On this blog and others, you often find discussion about the right time of day to post your updates for maximum visibility. On one hand, this is a useful discussion to have; if you’re posting a critical piece of content, you want it seen by as many people as possible. The discussion breaks down when you’re posting more than one piece of content in a day. Many businesses have two, three, four or more posts they want to make each day. Some fall into the trap of scheduling all of them to post in the same short time frame, overloading your fans’ timelines. What you should do is identify two or three high-activity times each day and schedule your posts around those times. Two posts in succession, separated by an hour or so, aren’t bad. Three or more in such a short time will come across as spam.
Stick to Pleasant Controversies
Bringing up a controversial topic can be a good way to foster a lot of activity and discussion on your page. Activity and comments are EdgeRank factors that will make your posts more visible. Controversy is good, in that respect, but you need to be careful about the sorts of discussion you start.
- Avoid deeply emotional controversies, particularly when they aren’t related to your business. There’s no reason you need to express an opinion one way or the other about sexuality, marriage equality or related topics unless you’re directly catering to one side in your entire business model.
- Focus on more light-hearted controversies; fame battles between celebrities, competitions between sports teams and the like are better choices.
- Avoid taking a side; any choice you make alienates fans of the other side.
Proof Your Posts
When you write a post, follow this checklist before you submit it:
- Are all of the words properly chosen for their connotation? This is where using a thesaurus blindly can get you in trouble.
- Are all of the words spelled correctly?
- Is the post grammatically correct?
- If you’re including a link, is it the right link?
- If you’re uploading an image, is it the right image?
- Have you previewed the post? Tools that allow you to see what the post looks like live are valuable here.
Keep It Short and Sweet
Twitter is the exemplar of short and sweet, but it’s just one of many social media platforms taken to the extreme. Facebook users have the same sort of short attention span. The longer your post is, the less anyone wants to read it. If you’re posting five sentence updates every day, you’re putting walls of words on your users’ timelines. They don’t have the time or the attention to read all of that.
Think of it this way; anything over two sentences is getting a bit too long. Establish an average of short headlines and hooks in your posts. Then, when you need to make a long post about a subject important to your business, users are more likely to realize it’s special and will dedicate more time to reading.
Savor the Negative
Negative criticism seems detrimental to your business when left live. It’s why reputation management companies work to rid the Internet of negative commentary. However, the typical web users assigns more weight to the absence of negative commentary than they do to what that commentary would say. If there’s nothing negative published, it looks like you’re intentionally censoring your comments.
Embrace the occasional negative post. Treat negative posts as customer service opportunities. Comment on them and try to reach out and make things right. It wont’ always work, but it’s a visible sign of your attempt. Make sure to personalize your response; nothing is more obnoxious than a form response posted to ten different individual issues.
Don’t Beg
One common piece of advice when you’re trying to gather social metrics is to ask for them. When you ask users to share a post, you’ll get more shares than if you left the post alone. Unfortunately, there’s a fine line between asking for social engagement and begging for social signals. The latter is penalized by Facebook, while the former is beneficial all around.
The key is to make sure your post has value beyond being sharebait. Don’t post a picture and ask users to share it for no reason; post a valuable infographic and ask users to share it if they liked it. Make sure the users have a reason to share it.
Shift Your Audience
If you’ve followed all of the above advice and you’re still losing fans, you might have to evaluate your audience. Are you targeting the right people? Sure, you can attract a ton of people with a giveaway, but many of them won’t stay beyond the end date of the contest. Those that do might not engage with your brand and are effectively low quality fans. It’s always possible that you just haven’t hit upon the right audience in your advertising. It’s okay to lose fans when those fans weren’t going to engage or convert anyway; just look to see if there are more fitting groups to target.