Are Your Facebook Page Updates Boring Your Fans?

Have any of these situations happened to you?

• You post day after day, but your engagement is always low, with maybe a single like for every three posts.
• You post what you think is a pretty interesting story, only to get two likes from your 20,000 followers.
• You post an incredibly interesting story, but every comment you get just talks about how boring it is.
• You post story after story, but nothing happens. You hear a sound. You turn up your speakers, and you hear crickets chirping.

If so, you might be suffering from Facebook Post Boredom Syndrome.

Signs of Bored Facebook Followers

There are a number of ways you can tell that your followers aren’t interested in what you have to say. Unfortunately, there’s only one way to tell whether they’re bored or just not real fans. Fake fans are a real problem, and the only way to tell the difference between a disengaged real fan and a fake fan is to be less boring, so the real fans start to engage more.

Sign 1: No one is responding. Whenever you post an update, you should expect a certain amount of engagement on each post. If you have zero engagement – no likes, no shares, no comments, no clicks – either no one saw the post, or no one cares about the content. You might be posting at the wrong time of day, or you might have attracted the wrong kind of people. Checking your content, however, is the easiest first step to take.

Sign 2: No one is sharing your content. This is arguably worse than no one commenting. People can share without comment, after all. A share is also incredibly valuable. It’s like a personal recommendation from one person to each of their friends, saying hey, look at this interesting content.

Shares benefit you in a number of ways, so you always want to get more of them. If no one is sharing your content, it’s a sign that they don’t find your content interesting enough to share.

Sign 3: You aren’t growing. When your content is interesting, it gets spread around and made more visible. When users who don’t follow you see that interesting content, they might follow your page in order to see more of it. If your content isn’t interesting enough to hook them, you won’t get any new followers from it.

Sign 4: Minimal reach. Part of the algorithm that determines who sees your posts on Facebook relies on how much they have seen and interacted with your posts in the past. If they don’t find your content interesting, Facebook will notice, and will show them less of it. If this happens on a broad scale, due to boring posts, your reach in general will drop.

Becoming Less Boring

The key to being less boring on Facebook is to be more interesting. If that sounds obvious, you aren’t giving it as much thought as you should be. Just think about it from the user’s perspective. What do you find interesting when you’re browsing Facebook? What about when it comes from a business?

Tip 1: Be less formal. Chances are you can stand to be less formal in your discussions online. You don’t need to drop down to using chatspeak just to seem hip, or anything. Just don’t talk like you’re writing a corporate press release. Be casual! Be fun! Refer to customers as people, rather than customers or clients. You’re a human, let it show.

Tip 2: Have a little pride in your work. Proofread your posts before you share them and make sure your word choices are all correct. Nothing kills trust in a post like a their/they’re/there error. Likewise, always make sure any link you share is definitely the link you meant to share, any picture you upload is the version you wanted to upload, etc.

Tip 3: Keep it short. Social Media Examiner recommends keeping your Facebook posts under 100 characters. This is about the same length as your average tweet. This has the additional side-effect of making your longer posts stand out more, as if they’re more important.

Tip 4: Images. Probably over half of your Facebook posts should be images or image-related. Posting pictures, posting motivational images, posting memes if you know how to use them; they are all heads and shoulders above plain text posts in terms of engagement and interest. It’s exceptionally easy if you’re a brand selling a physical product you can pose in various locations, but with a little creativity, any brand can use imagery.

Tip 5: Reveal the backstage. Sometimes it can be very compelling to give a glimpse behind the scenes, at the people who work in your office and their daily lives. Of course, you want to spice this up a bit so it’s not actually depicting the gray, boring drudgery that daily live typically is. Birthdays are great for this.

Tip 6: Ask questions. Questions can range from the superfluous to the serious. Ask about the weather, ask about holiday plans, as for product feedback, whatever. The point is to ask something that compels the user to answer. Answers = comments, and comments = more visibility.

Tip 7: Exclusive information. Post a special deal on Facebook, but don’t share it on Twitter or on your website. Give Facebook fans a reason to feel special. You can’t fan-gate content, unfortunately, so you can’t decidedly limit the promotion to just Facebook fans. You can, however, make the announcement timely and limit how far it can spread before time runs out.

And, of course, you just have the choice of topic. What do you talk about? Well, what are your fans interested in? You can get a lot from peeking into your audience Insights, though it’s not strictly guaranteed to help. Find some common interests and speak to them. Get to know your users and figure out what they like. Cater to those likes. With practice, you’ll get it.