You get only 2 seconds to convince your visitors about your relevance. If you fail, the visitor clicks the back button and leave your site for good. Here’s how you can stop it.
According to the stats released by Facebook, a jaw-dropping 1.11 billion people log in to Facebook monthly, of which 665 million use the social network site on a daily basis. In the context of its galloping popularity, Marketo Inc has predicted the potential promotional opportunities Facebook offers for your brand with the following astounding figures:
- At least 20% of Facebook users make a buying decision based on their experience on a Facebook Ad or comment on a brand page.
- Moreover, a whopping 68% of all buyers rely on product reviews on a social network site.
Suffice it to say, social commerce in the US is poised to grow from $1 billion in 2011 to $14 billion by 2014. It also stands to reason that businesses need to have a strong Facebook presence in order to stay competitive.
Almost sixty per cent of the SEO clients I meet explain their challenges to grow a Facebook page. Maintaining a Facebook Page requires some amount of discipline and creativity. Can’t say for others, but this is what I’ve learned over the years while working on a Facebook Community Page of my city.
Although, there’s no magic wand to grow a Facebook Page overnight, there’s always a set of best practices that you can follow in order to build your Facebook audience. Here are some of the things I’ve learned while working on my Facebook Page.
Understand Your Audience
When you start a Facebook Page, you must have a specific audience in mind and build your content around the tastes of the targeted audience. The target audience may not have arrived at your page but having your content tailored according to their taste can help your page grow faster.
If possible, list URLs of the Facebook posts that your audience specifically engage with. It helps you understand their taste better and build your future content based on their unspoken feedback. By and large, Facebook audiences are taste-sensitive, and if you’re able to establish what they like, you’re going to see the number of likes grow rapidly.
Know How to Curate Information
Facebook content creation is a creatively demanding process, especially when you’re targeting a segment of audience in your niche. Therefore, coming up with new share-worthy info could pose a challenge to you. Repeating the content patterns or focusing on a stereotypical method may turn off your fans, discouraging them to ignore your posts. This might lead to low traction and little conversion.
To avoid this, you must learn how to curate relevant content on the Internet. It may require some research but don’t shy away from working on it daily. There is a lot of useful information available on the Internet, and you must make that effort to make it available to your audience. Not only does it make your Facebook page a powerhouse of relevant info for your audience, it also establishes your topical authority within the niche.
Bonus Tips: Set up Google Alerts for the popular keywords in your niche and stay alerted when something new takes place in your industry. This will help you share the info or break the latest news to you audience.
Create Consumable Content
With an overwhelming amount of information available, your potential audience is likely get frustrated when they come across irrelevant and seemingly imposing content that they can’t relate to or put to use immediately. Therefore, the secret to wining the attention and interaction of your audience is to offer them something that is consumable.
By consumable content, I mean you should use a variety of content formats that help your audience to understand the update quickly enough. This is the reason why infographics and memes have become a resounding success with the mainstream Facebook audience. A combination of short and interesting videos, memes, and inforgrpahics along with regular updates can keep your audience entertained and coming back for more.
Interact with Your Audience
Winning the attention of your Facebook audience is important, but what’s more important is keeping them engaged in the conversation, especially when they’re talking about relevant questions. This proves your credibility as the authority in your industry and humanizes your brand as your page develops a personality. When you replies to specific queries on your page, maintain an objective tone and thank them for staying engaged. This boosts the self-esteem of your audience, giving them an emotional push to being more engaged with your brand.
Be Consistent with Your Posts (Relevance)
Being consistent with your message and tone is almost imperative, but challenging nevertheless. Your audience wants to stay updated on the news relevant to their niche, and this is the reason why they subscribed to your page. Feeding random irrelevant updates, therefore, can turn off your audience and, possibly, can even build a negative impression about your brand.
However, it’s okay to publish popular memes occasionally to entertain your audience. In fact, if your page acts like a robot, it potentially misses out on the opportunities to draw the attention of quite a few prospective visitors to your page. Throw in some personality – it’s okay to crack a joke or two occasionally. If you can keep it relevant to your niche, that would be great too.
The above tips are natural ways of fostering a bond with your audience and keep them coming back to your page for more. These are just some pointers and, by no means, are absolute and exhaustive. The scope of going creative is huge and I’m sure you will learn and develop your own individualistic ways to spellbind your audience when you manage your Facebook page.
Do you know any specific tips that could help Facebook pages grow their audience and traction?
Leave them in the comment section below. Thanks!
