Facebook For Brands Tips

Determine your identity – Start by figuring out what your brand is.  Your brand isn’t your product or service. It is about how you make people feel about themselves when they connect to you. Think of the core values that you will connect over. For example, the Weight Watchers brand isn’t focused on weight loss solutions, it is about “empowerment  and empathy,” Starbucks isn’t about coffee, but about community and lifestyle. Knowing your brand identity helps build your “persona” and shapes your content strategy. 

Define your goals – What do you want Facebook to help you accomplish? Examples might be to drive readers to your publication website or increase your circle of supporters / donors, etc. Knowing why you want to build a Facebook community helps you plan a stronger content strategy than just making random posts. Another major, important, really big thing to consider is whether Facebook is the right channel for you and your audience. Copyblogger recently decided to kills it Facebook page with more than 38,000 fans after reviewing its metrics and realizing that isn’t where its audience “lived.”

Target relevant followers – Getting a lot of Likes doesn’t mean much if your followers don’t engage with your posts. It can even hurt you these days because Facebook doesn’t show your message to all of your followers, only to a random few. Make sure that the ones who do see it count, by courting people who are interested in what you have to offer.

What are your target followers interests and needs – Think about how to make their lives easier, more skilled, happier or more connected to others, etc. Facebook Graph search can help identify interests among your target audience http://theslantedlens.com/2014/how-to-understand-your-target-audience-facebook-graph-search/

Grow, reward, engage your fans – Contests can be a fun way to build your community, but make sure the contest is tied to your brand. Don’t give away an iPad just to get followers, because they won’t love you for who you are.  Keep the contest topic and reward on message. Facebook has rules on running contests, so there are some third-party apps that can be helpful in managing them for you. ShortStack is a popular, free app. PostPlanner has a good discussion of two more free apps here.

Follow the 70/20/10 rule – Most content (70%) should be brand / business building, with information of value for your audience. The rest is content shared from other sources (20%) and self-promotion (10%). Example: Intel

Craft a solid post – There are some tips out there about style and length and using images to get the best results, but you’ll need to monitor your insights to see what works with your followers. http://blog.heyo.com/perfect-facebook-post/

Post Consistently – Social Media Examiner in August 2014 offered helpful up-to-date advice on how to determine how frequently you should post and how to see which kinds of posts are the most effective. BufferApp blog reports a study that says “posting once per week on Facebook was so low as to lose connection with your audience and posting more than twice per day was crossing the line into annoying.”

Mine, crowdsource, re-surface, re-package content – Generating frequent posts doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Watch for reports and data that you can quickly localize. Ask followers to share their photos. Extract interesting content you already have from old articles, tip sheets or annual reports and present it in smaller chunks, infographics or other formats that you can share.  

Know your image sizes – Use these guides to showcase your images, cover photos and profile pics best https://www.facebook.com/PagesSizesDimensions Here’s a more detailed instruction for photos in news feeds http://visual.ly/unofficial-guide-facebooks-new-news-feed-image-sizes

Fill out your profile completely– Some people overlook this.