Social Media 201: How to get your Facebook posts seen

 

If you are new to Facebook or don’t have a business page yet, please start at our Social Media 101: How to get your Facebook posts seen.

 

 

How frustrating is it when you post something on your business page and check on the post hours later to see that only 146 people (of your say 2000 fans) have seen that post? It’s incredibly frustrating.

The average these days for business posts seen is about 10% of your total fans. 10%! I know how hard you worked getting your fans, but only 10% of them are seeing your posts!?!?

On my business page I am averaging that most of my posts are reaching about 40% of my fans (some up to 200% of my number of fans, yes, this is possible).

Below I will give you a few tips on how to get your percentage up.

 

Time of Day:

Posting at specific times of the day is important. Overall, experts say to post between 4pm-7pm to have posts seen.

This is true for many types of pages. If you are in the mommy market, like me, this could be the exact wrong time (depending on where you live as well).

Most moms head to facebook during naptime in the early afternoon and later in the evening after bedtime.

Keep in mind which timezone you are in as well. If you are EST (Eastern Standard Time), then your kids bedtime will be dinner for us on the westcoast!

I would suggest your posts be between 11-3pm PST(Pacific Standard Time) or 4-11pm PST to reach all time zones.

 

Get interactive:

The key is to get fans to interact with your page.

When someone comments on your post, their friends may see that they have commented, this gets your name out there and that friend may head over to check out what you have to offer.

They also may also comment, which would show up for their friends and the viral aspect of Facebook has begun!.

If you are simply stating something new is on the website, I suggest asking a question, or making a statement that may get a response.

For example, if you want them to see the latest product, you could post, ‘what is your favorite product I sell?

Do you see anything new today?’

Type of Posts:

Nobody wants to ‘like’ a page that only tries to sell you something.

This is actually the last thing they want. Personally, I want to ‘like’ a page that teaches me something, or asks me to contribute.

 

Day of the week:

I have heard that it is good to post when others are not posting, this will increase the number of news feeds your post will show up in.

For business posts this will be Saturday and Sundays.

However, if you have a lot of fans who work full time, Monday to Friday (specifically without kids), they may do their majority of posting on these days.  

If most of your fans are stay at home moms, then their news feeds will most likely be busiest on the weekdays.

So aim for at least one or two posts on the weekend.

 

Pictures worth 1000 words?:

Photos tend to get noticed more on newsfeeds, but text only posts seem to appear in more newsfeeds due to facebook’s designs.

I would suggest a combination of both all text and text with photo posts to maximize readership.

 

Target your post:

This is a new option from Facebook that allows businesses to target certain types of fans.

All posts will appear on your page, but will appear on your targeted newsfeeds more frequently.

The other day I targeted a post to males.

I have only about 1800 of my fans being male and it reached 900 people.

Were they all male?

As far as I can tell, there is no way to know.

This is a new feature of facebook and I look forward to seeing how it can help me reach people.

 

Pay to Promote:

Does it frustrate me that in order to reach all my fans, I need to pay to promote.

I worked hard at getting my fans, shouldn’t they be able to see my posts?

I do understand that Facebook is free to use, yet needs to pay it’s bills and turn a profit, just like we do.

It makes sense to charge businesses rather than regular people for their services.

Because honestly, what would we do without Facebook? It is the reason why my business exists.

I have tried pay to promote once.

I posted something and paid to have it reach 4000 people.

Most of my posts at that time reached about 2000. I ended up reaching 5200 people.

So yes, it did better than I expected. Would I do it again, possibly.

Would I do it regularly, no. Let’s face it, none of us have a large advertising budget.

I would rather find ways on my own to reach as many fans as possible.

 

Tagging:

This may be a lost technique. It used to be that a business page could tag another business page and it would show up on that page.

These days I am finding that they are not. It seems they *may* send notifications to the page that it has been tagged, depending on settings.

I am also finding that when my fans write on my wall and tag another company it does show up on both pages.

This is useful.

Encourage fan interaction, and this will happen.

 

I am sure, as Facebook evolves, there will be many more tricks and tips I have to offer.

I will follow up with this post as updates occur.

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