Images are an important part of making your Facebook page attractive to readers.
Do you have a Facebook page that just doesn’t seem to be getting as much attention as you hoped? It can be hard to make sure you are doing everything you can to stand out from the millions of other Facebook pages, competing for your readers’ attention. With Facebook consistently changing its algorithms, here are five tips that can help take your Facebook page from one lost in the crowd to the star of the show.
1) About Us Section –The About Us section isn’t the first thing people see when they visit your Facebook page but if they’re interested in you, it is the first place they’ll go. One way to keep them interested in your business is to fill out as much as the information as possible so they can easily learn more. Remember that people don’t love reading novels on Facebook, so you’ll have to keep it snappy and entertaining to keep a potential client interested.
2) Consistent Posts – Just like many things, you have to be consistent to gain followers. The less you post, the less Facebook shows people your page. While it may be hard or near impossible for you to post on the page every day of the week, just three or four posts a week can go a long way. If you know you’ll have a busy few days ahead that may have you neglecting your social media accounts, get comfortable with Facebook’s scheduling feature. It will often become your best friend when you know you won’t have time to plan a post. With the scheduling tools available, there are very few excuses to have your page inactive for days or weeks at a time even when life comes calling.
3) Less Text on Posts – A 2011 study in Behavior & Information Technology showed that a website only has 50 milliseconds before people form a first impression. While that doesn’t seem like a lot of time, websites even have an advantage over social media posts in that they don’t have other posts competing for their readers’ attentions on the same page. That isn’t the case for Facebook posts.
According to research by Buddy Media, posts with less than 80 characters received 66 percent more engagement than posts longer than that count and an Express Writers infographic showed that posts with 40 characters or fewer takes that percentage up to 86 percent more than the longer posts. So even though you are trying to help your audience get as much information as possible, it could actually be harmful to getting any of the information out to the right eyes. If you do have to write a longer post, make sure you make it as concise as possible and try to avoid a post long enough for the “see more” button to appear.
4) Sharing Posts – Sharing posts you find from other pages is a great way to pass along information to your audience but it is also one of those things you can overdo. A shared post or two a week isn’t a bad thing but make sure they don’t take over your page. If you are posting shared posts, make them engaging to your readers by including a caption or question to show that you are also interested in the content and aren’t just sharing to try and trick the algorithm.
5) Videos – Are you part of a sport or have something that would look better on video than in a photo? Don’t be afraid to hit the record button. People love watching videos but most pages don’t take advantage of the easy way to get extra attention with 47 percent of 1,000 Facebook pages Locowise looked at in early 2018 never posting a video. In November of 2015, Techcrunch reported that Facebook had an average of eight billion video views a day, up from four billion six months earlier. While Facebook counts any video watched for three seconds or more as a “view”, that stat showed that videos do play an important part in a page’s success.
According to Locowise in May 2017, only seven percent of videos are played with sound so don’t worry too much about the music or background noise in your video (though do mute it if there’s a conversation going on that isn’t relevant to your post). Also keep in mind that while longer videos seem like the way to go, Locowise also found in April 2018 that the average duration of a view is 18.2 seconds while the average length of a video is 55.3 seconds, showing that your message can easily be lost if a video is longer.
Have a media topic you’d like to see covered here? Email Melissa@PyroisMedia.com with your suggestions and you could see it in a future blog!