Tag Archives: facebook page

Facebook Page posts now more visible

Following Facebook’s scrapping of the rule on using text in Cover Photos and introduction of hashtags, there’s more good news for brands and businesses. Facebook has introduced two new features that will help users find content and discover new stories on the News Feed; ‘story bumping’ and ‘last actor’.

Before explaining the improvements and their benefit to Pages, here’s an explanation of how content is displayed in the News Feed. An average users Friends and Pages generate around 1500 stories per day which means it’s unlikely that all of these will be seen on the News Feed. So Facebook uses a ranking system to determine what appears in our News Feeds. It scores each story based on three main criteria; the Friend’s or Page’s relationship to the user, its content - eg photos score higher than text, plus how many Likes, Comments and Shares it has. Higher ranked stories are then placed at the top of the News Feed. In simple terms, the News Feed shows you stories that you will find most interesting. If the ranking system thinks that you’ll find a post very interesting, it will be published near the top. If a story is less interesting to you, it will be published further down, below other things that seem more important.

Story Bumping

Story bumping is an improvement to the ranking system that places stories that you might have missed at the top of the News Feed. Previously new stories were placed at the top but this change places stories that are new to you at the top of the Page. For example, stories that you didn’t scroll down to when checking Facebook in the morning are brought back to the top  alongside newer content posted, when you look at your News Feed in the afternoon.

This is great news for Page owners as it means more or their posts will be seen. During testing Facebook saw an 8% increase in interactions from Pages with the percentage of stories read grew from 57 percent to 70 percent. Story bumping is now live on the web version of Facebook and will be added to mobile shortly.

Last Actor

This tweak to the News Feed places more prominence on recent conversations and actions you’ve had with Friends and Pages. The algorithm will now keep track of the last 50 Likes, Comments and Shares and ensure that more posts with users and Pages you’ve recently interacted with will be included in your News Feed. Like story bumping this change means increased visibility for Pages that interact with their Fans. Last actor has been rolled out both to the Facebook on the web and mobile apps.

These changes make it even more important for businesses and brands to create engaging, interesting and relevant content that generates interaction in the form of Likes, Comments, Shares and Clicks to ensure their Page and content obtains as much visibility as possible. For ideas on how to do this read - 5 ways to encourage interaction on Facebook.

How to create your own Facebook Page address (URL) - [VIDEO]

Here’s a short video where I explain how to create a web address (or user name as Facebook calls it) for your Facebook Page. If you spend a lot of time working on your Facebook Page you want to ensure that as many people as possible can find and access it. Having your own customised address has the following benefits:

• Your own address is easier for people to remember than an address with a string of numbers
• Your Facebook Page address can reflect your brand
• A Facebook Page with your brand or business name included in the URL is more easily found on Facebook and by search engines
• It looks neater when printed on business cards. leaflets, menus and other printed material

To find our more about how I can help you and your business use Facebook to its advantage, check out the Services section.

How to bore your Facebook fans

Content is vital when it comes to achieving success with social media. You can be an expert on technical tips and tricks and search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques but it’s regular, valuable and shareable content that will grab the attention of your readers. You need to engage your fans; not bore them.

Of course you’ll want to mention your products, services and events from time to time but occasional is the key. It’s not a good idea to repeatedly promote your own stuff as this will turn off readers rather than engage them.

An example of how not to do it comes from The Gloucestershire Echo Facebook Page. The last four posts on their Page are promoting The Gloucestershire Women in Business Awards and the most recent of these was 4 weeks ago. So repeated promotion and irregular updates. Indeed, as a fan pointed out on 6 December the Page is ‘quiet’. At the time of writing that post has yet to be replied to.

5 secret Facebook Page tips

Here are 5 tips that you can use to make your Facebook Page more effective and help increase your fans and grow your sales. You may not have come across these tips before:

1. Under About add a ‘call to action’ - include a web address eg “Visit our website at www.website.com for exclusive photos.”

2. Add your Twitter account name - add your Twitter URL to the Description or General information section. Hyperlinks are supported so this makes it easy for visitors to find and follow you on Twitter.

3. Create a ‘Welcome Page’ - following the introduction of Timeline there was disappointment at the loss of the Welcome Page. However, there is nothing to stop you linking visitors from your website (or anywhere else) directly to an app where you can welcome them with a special offer or competition.

4. Encourage fans to Message you - you may have noticed a Message button on the top of some Pages. Make sure that yours is enabled and encourage fans to message you. These messages are private so you could use to manage customer service queries.

5. Schedule your posts - by selecting the clock on the bottom left of the “Write something…” field you can date posts in the past but you can also schedule up to 6 months in advance in 10 minute increments. Great for planning your content.

If you have any other ‘secret’ Facebook Page tips please share them in the comments below.

Terrific use of Facebook tagging

An innovative use of Facebook comes from totepool.com bookmakers. They’re running a competition requiring racegoers to tag themselves and their Managing Director Fred Done in a photo taken at York races. In addition, competition entrants are also encouraged to tweet about the competition. The panoramic photo is very high resolution and it’s easy to navigate around the whole scene.

The promotion labelled ‘Find Fred and win with totepool‘ encourages racegoers who were present on Betfred Ebor Handicap Day to find and then tag themselves on Facebook for a chance to win a VIP day at the races in October plus free bets.

This is an engaging competition and a great way for totepool to raise awareness of their brand and betting products.

Have you entered any interesting Facebook competitions? If so, please let me know.

5 ways to encourage interaction on Facebook

Social media is all about interacting with your audience and on Facebook this means your fans. Your posts should be crafted in such a way that they create a reaction from your audience. On Facebook this takes the form of Liking, Commenting or best of all Sharing your posts. The more fans interact with your posts, the more likely it is that Facebook will feature your posts in your fans’ newsfeeds. This is important as it helps increase visibility of your brand.

This interaction is often called engagement by social media experts although for me this is more about creating feelings and establishing an emotional response with your fans. However, there is no doubt that interaction leads to engagement.

Without further ado here are 5 ways to increase interaction on Facebook:

1) Ask questions - It’s a simple but effective technique. Fans like answering questions and can use Comments to reply. A good tactic is to make a statement, for example offer an opinion, and then ask your fans what they think.

2) Keep your posts concise - Twitter’s success is built on the 140 character limit to posts. Very short posts on Facebook tend to create more engagement than longer ones. A recent survey from Buddy Media showed that posts of 80 characters or less had 27% higher engagement rates.

3) Use the full web address - This might seem to contradict point 2 but using a URL shortener on Facebook posts can result in up to 94% less engagement according to Kissmetrics. Fans like to know which website they are being directed to so try and use the full web address.

4) Ask people to engage - Using ‘calls to action’ and action words results in higher engagement. Action words such as Like, Comment, Share, Post, Submit and phrases such as Tell Us and Ask Us work well.

5) Post at the weekend - You might think that business content should only be posted during during the working week. Yet an infographic from Kissmetrics shows that the most sharing of posts occurs on a Saturdays.

You can learn more about interaction and engagement on Facebook at my regular workshops in Cheltenham at £87 per person. Go here for further information and booking or ask me about one to one training.

Facebook rolling out targeted updates

Facebook has begun rolling out improved ‘Page post targeting’ allowing Pages to publish their posts to particular groups of fans using new criteria such as age and gender - see full list below. At present Page admins can only target  using Location and Language.

This improvement brings Facebook closer to Google+ where Pages can target messages to specific audiences using Circles. The advantage of Google+  is that Circles are totally customisable - for example, a Page have a Circle of suppliers and Circle for clients. However, these have to be manually created. The advantage of Facebook is that they are using existing data so  specific audiences according the the following criteria just need to be selected:

• Age
• Gender
• Interested In
• Relationship Status
• Education
• College Graduate: College Name, Major
• In College: College Name, Major, Years
• In High School
• Workplace
• Existing options — Language and Location: Country, State, City

Those Fans of a Page that don’t meed the target criteria will still be able to see posts on the Page itself.

Currently being tested with a few Facebook Pages, this is a valuable improvement to which will roll out over the next few weeks.

You can now change your Facebook Page URL and Name

Up until last month it wasn’t easy to change your username (aka Facebook Page URL) after it had been set as you had to contact Facebook. But now Page Admins can change their Page username in the Admin panel IF you have less than 200 Likes. You can only do this once though so make sure you have the username you want. Reasons for changing the username of a Page might include a spelling mistake or company/organisation name change.

For example, following the name change of Cheltenham Social Media Club to #wearesocialclub the URL for visiting the Facebook Page is now facebook.com/wearesocialclub.

To change the username of your Page go to http://facebook.com/username or Edit Page/Update Info/Username/Change username.

Furthermore, restrictions on changing the Facebook Page name - name displayed at top of Page - have now been eased and as long as you have less than 200 Likes you can amend the name as many times as you like. Again, you might want to do this following a business or organisation name change.

To change your Page Name go to Edit Page/Update Info/Name.