How to make text updates as effective as photos

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, marketers.

It seems like all the “experts” tell us is to post photos on our Facebook page to get more likes, comments and shares.

Text updates aren’t as sexy, but they can be equally as effective.

Why bother posting text updates on your Facebook page?

Why should you care about posting text updates when the research says photos work best?

There are at least two reasons:

1. Research is always biased. All studies about how content performs on Facebook is based on aggregate data from thousands of Facebook users, and never a true benchmark for your unique community. It’s like comparing apples with a huge bag of fruit.
2. Posting diverse content helps you engage more users simply because people have diverse preferences for content type and content topics.

Here are three specific ways you can boost the number of comments on your text updates:

Ask closed questions

1Closed questions take advantage of the brain’s built-in auto complete feature.

Instead of sucking up RAM formulating an answer to an open question, your brain simply has to spit out a “yes” or“no,” “true” or “false” or some other choice between two predetermined answers. Research also shows that closed questions work better on Facebook then open questions.

Be hyper-specific

2The more specific your question is, the more likely it will receive comments. The reason why is because people don’t have to do a lot of homework to come up with an answer.

For example, asking people what their favorite species of bat is will get more responses then asking people what their favorite animal is. Even more specific (and more fun) is asking if what species of bat would they’d be if they could be one!

Do their homework

3Make it easier for people to answer questions by pre-fixing the question with the type of question being asked. For example, write “QUICK POLL:” before you ask a poll question (like the example above). This instantly prompts the brain with what’s required to participate (“A poll question? I can do that!”).

Friends first on Facebook

It’s not that people are lazy, it’s that they’re distracted and busy. The key is to make the hurdles low enough so that more people can participate in your community. And greater participation leads to increased viral reach, increased affinity (a factor that influences EdgeRank) and increased fan growth.

How have you been using text updates? Share your wisdom below!

The post 3 ways to boost Facebook engagement with text updates appeared first on Socialbrite.

5 ways to improve your organization’s visibility through Graph Search

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, marketers, Facebook users.

Facebook Graph Search is very different from Google search. With Graph Search — which is still in the process of being rolled out to Facebook’s 1 billion members — you combine a keyword search with friends who’ve shared content on Facebook related to that search.

For example, you can search for friends in Boston who like volunteering for animal shelters. What this means is that there are now many more ways for people to discover your organization on Facebook!

Note that Graph Search doesn’t search your Facebook updates but rather is limited to the public, searchable information on people’s and organizations’ profile pages and the pages they’ve liked.

Here are just five ways graph search will impact your nonprofit’s presence on Facebook:

Your page is key

1Graph Search indexes the keywords in your page’s About section, the category and sub-categories you’ve selected for your page, your page user name and more. Inbound links to your page will also help influence how your page shows up in searches. Here are eight ways to optimize your page.

Nodes will be key

2Graph search will show people the prevalence of friend connections with your organization. Deepening engagement with your top fans will help expand existing friend networks (nodes) as more and more of their friends are sucked into your vortex of awesome!

Events will be key

3Facebook events will be a primary result that appears in Graph searches. It’s important to pay attention to how you describe and title your event, and how well you promote that event to your fans.

Photos will matter more

4Graph search will boost the value (engagement) of photos posted to your page, simply because they will be a primary content type displayed in Graph Search results.

Likes will matter (again)

5Over the past few months there have been many discussions about whether page Likes are more important than reach and engagement. Now, with Graph Search, Liking a page does matter – even if most of your fans don’t see your content.

That said, the affinity between a fan and a Page (Edgerank) is most likely factored into the Graph Search algorithm.

These are just a few things to consider with Graph Search. 

What do you think about Graph Search?

Related

• 8 steps to prepare your Facebook page for Graph Search (Socialbrite)

• Boost engagement and likes on Facebook (Socialbrite)

• 19 ways to engage your nonprofit’s Facebook fans (Socialbrite)

The post Understanding how Facebook Graph Search works appeared first on Socialbrite.

6 tips to keep your content top-of-stream

Guest post by Meghan Keaney Anderson
Hubspot

In late September news trickled out about a change in Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm that was causing big drops in reach for many branded pages for nonprofits, businesses and all organizations. The EdgeRank algorithm determines which posts are displayed in the newsfeed and in what priority order. Noticing a clear decrease in the reach and virality of pages, Beth Kanter took to Facebook to see if many nonprofits had experienced it. She received a number of replies affirming the dropoff, while others, like John Haydon at Socialbrite, say the evidence doesn’t support that claim.

What seems to have changed?

Both EdgeRank Checker and Post Rocket have good posts on the details, but in a nutshell, Facebook has altered the way it displays posts in the newsfeed to prioritize posts that have the greatest number of interactions – a cumulative figure determined by the number of clicks, likes, comments and shares a post receives. The new algorithm also factors in negative feedback and penalizes posts that have been actively hidden by viewers or reported as spam.

Regardless of whether Facebook’s code tweaking is having an impact on your fans’ newsfeeds, the real question now is: Short of paying for promoted posts, what can nonprofits do to adjust to these changes and make sure their content earns the sort of reach and virality needed to engage new volunteers, donors and advocates? Here are a few tips to keep in mind to help your content remain top-of-stream.

Audit your content

1The major point that emerges from Facebook’s explanation of the new algorithm is that posts with the most positive engagement in the form of clicks, likes, comments and shares will appear more often in the newsfeed, resulting in higher reach and virality. This could be a good thing for Facebook users. As more and more brands have ramped up their presence on Facebook, the newsfeed has become increasingly cluttered with content. The algorithm change was designed, at least in part, to reduce the noise in an individual’s newsfeed and give more prominence to really good content.

How to leverage it: Take 30 minutes to audit your content that has done well in the past on Facebook. Put your top content through each of the following questions and see where trends emerge.

• What common traits do the posts have in terms of subject matter or format?
• What tone did each of your top shares have? Were they urgent? Funny? Or did they raise questions for response?
• What was the call to action, if any? In her recent book “Measuring the Networked Nonprofit,” Beth Kanter talks about a ladder of engagement, with smaller actions laying the foundation for larger ones. Where in the ladder of engagement would you place the calls to action of your top posts?

Once you have laid out your top posts and examined their tone, content and format, use any themes that emerged to map out your future posts.

Post at the optimal time to drive activity

2Because so much of the new algorithm depends on early activity, timing is just as important as content. In 2011, HubSpot’s Dan Zarrella conducted extensive research on the topic of social media timing. He studied more than 1.3 million posts from the 10,000 most-Liked Facebook pages to glean some larger trends in the timing of social shares. What he found for Facebook was that shares on average had the highest rate of activity during the weekend. It’s easy to forget about posting on weekends, but weekends are prime-time for engagement with newsfeed posts. Many offices still block Facebook during the workweek. Even for those who allow it, the weekend allows more time for individuals to browse and interact with posts.

How to leverage it: Use a social media scheduler to line up posts for the weekend. See How to schedule a Facebook page update, and see what kind of activity you get. Don’t rely on HubSpot’s research alone, however. Conduct your own experiments to see what days and times tend to see the highest activity within your office. Pull your top posts and see if any trends emerge in the timing of those with the most interaction. Similarly, pull posts that saw no engagement and try to identify black holes in your sharing schedule to avoid in the future. Here’s a look at HubSpot’s analysis, which I pulled together for this post.

As you can see, our posts seem to generate the most activity on Sunday, followed shortly after by Monday and Tuesday. We garner lower engagement toward the end of the week. I also took a look at the time of day when activity is highest for us. Sorted below in the HubSpot social media tool, you can see that we have had good success sharing content with our audience in the mornings.

Understand the behavior that leads to hide, hide-all, and unlike

3In addition to auditing what’s working with your shares, take a look at what would motivate a user to hide, hide-all or unlike your content. Hiding content is tantamount to deleting an email without reading it. Hiding-all is the equivalent of unsubscribing, and unliking closes the relationship entirely. In Facebook’s new algorithm, content that has negative feedback from some users can cause it to be minimized or pulled from all news feeds. Take a look at what could be causing people to hide or unlike your content. Are you posting too frequently? Try altering your schedule to add more space between your posts. Are you asking for too much? Compare posts with different calls to action to see what types cause hides or low engagement.

Post more images and videos

4Our research and our day-to-day experience shows that images and videos tend to have much higher engagement than text-only posts or links. Make sure you’ve got a healthy mix of images Below, an image from United Way of Massachusetts Bay & Merrimack Valley (an organization I support) shows the value of volunteering. The image resulted in 30 likes and 3 comments, among the highest levels of engagement on their page. Want to make an image even stronger? Couple it with a relevant link to your volunteer page or another call to action.

Balance your content

5Trying out different types of content will help you see what posts work best. In addition, keeping a healthy balance of different types of posts can help you engage different people. Oxfam does a nice job with this on their Facebook page. Think about mixing your content up to meet the interests of a growing audience and to keep your Facebook page fresh. Incorporate:

• Blog posts
• Images with calls to action
• Videos
• Cause-driven items for purchase
• Quotes from supporters
• Profiles of the people you serve
• Questions for your fans and followers
• Responses to your fans and followers

Advise super-fans to add your organization to an interest list

6One sure-fire way for your top supporter to see all of your organization’s shares is to encourage them to add you to an interest list. Interest lists on Facebook organize all of your favorite topics and keep you from missing posts. Even better, if the interest list is left public, others can subscribe it – expanding your reach.

You can create your own interest list with partner organizations or nonprofits in your geographic area, then encourage others to subscribe to it. Lists turn Facebook into a media consumption channel in addition to a social network.

Keep calm and inspire on

This was not the first adjustment Facebook has made and it likely won’t be the last. The best response to this and any change from a third party platform is to dissect what drives the change and determine how your social media strategy can best adapt to accommodate it. Early on, the algorithm change raised concerns that purchasing promoted posts would be the only reliable way to maintain a presence in the Facebook newsfeed. But a closer look at the character of the change reveals a number of methods that nonprofits can use remain on top without having to dip into vital funds. Even with algorithm changes, the main tenet of social shares remains true: Interesting, remarkable content will always rise to the top.

Related

• 13 ways to boost your Facebook Page reach without spending a dime (Socialbrite)

The post How nonprofits can adapt to Facebook’s newsfeed changes appeared first on Socialbrite.

How a few simple changes can make your Facebook Page more visible & engaging to fans

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, community managers, marketing professionals, NGOs, businesses, brands.

What is your nonprofit doing to engage with your Facebook fans? I put that question to attendees during a talk I gave recently at a gathering of New York nonprofit organizations — and heard about some great practices:

• Planned Parenthood was able to move its Facebook fans to successfully defend the organization against legislative attacks.

• MASA Israel found that including a media image (photo or video) with every wall post update increased wall post engagement. MASA Israel also developed a successful Facebook application that streamlines the program enrollment decision-making process.

• The Partnership at Drugfree.org held a successful Facebook wall chat, most recently with the actress Melissa Gilbert.

The importance of the newsfeed

At the event, convened by my colleagues Michelle Perrault and Seth Giammanco at Minds On Design Lab, I talked about how to ramp up your Facebook engagement. The presentation covered understanding Facebook post engagement, matching goals to engagement, practices and ideas for designing Facebook Page, and how to measure engagement and ROE (return on engagement).

Most fans never visit a Page but instead rely on the Page’s content to show up in their newsfeeds. A recent ComScore study reports that “Facebook users are 40-150 times more likely to consume branded content in the newsfeed than to visit the Fan Page itself.” However, the problem is that not all content will show up in the Top News section of the newsfeed, which is the default newsfeed setting.

Facebook uses an algorithm called EdgeRank that dictates which content will be featured prominently in an individual’s newsfeed. (See J.D. Lasica’s explanation of how EdgeRank works.) EdgeRank takes into account three factors: how recent was the content published (on a site, on a Facebook Page), how much interaction did the piece of content create and how regularly the individual interacts with that organization or brand. Thus, if an organization publishes a video to its Page, and no one Likes or comments on it, the video may never show up in the Top News newsfeed of someone’s home page. However, if an individual often Likes, shares or comments on that organization’s content, there is a higher likelihood that the video will show up as part of the Top News.

Setting goals is important

A recent Idealware study on the use of Facebook reveals that nonprofit organizations that set Facebook goals felt that goal-setting correlated with success on Facebook. In particular, organizations that had the most success with their Facebook page set goals of driving constituents to action and attracting particular kinds of constituents. A recent Hubspot report of Facebook brand pages reveals that businesses with 501-1,000 Facebook fans saw 3.5 times the amount of website traffic than Pages with fewer than 25 fans.

Designing Facebook Engagement

Creating Facebook Page engagement is challenging, which is why it is so important to help your fans engage through good Page design. There are four elements to good Facebook Page design:

• creating a welcoming portal with a custom welcome Page

• identifying what the main conversation within the Page will be about

• offering unique content to your Fans (found only on Facebook), and

• creating a content calendar for your Facebook Page.

In addition, you can design your calls to action for a higher return on engagement, as shown by this study by the PR firm 22Squared.

Practicing engagement

The slide deck from my presentation offers some good practices for creating more engagement, taken from a variety of sources. Ideas include posting five days a week, what time of day to post and which days of the week garner the highest engagement.

Measuring Facebook engagement

The last section of the presentation covers thinking about how to measure Facebook engagement, including mapping goals to actions and setting deeper benchmarking goals. The slide below from the presentation demonstrates this approach to Facebook measurement and quantifying return on engagement.

How are you using Facebook to create engagement? Please share your experiences.

Related

• Nonprofits: Are your Facebook fans engaged? (Socialbrite)

• Four-part series on how to use Facebook strategically (Socialmedia.biz)

• Tutorials on how to use Facebook well (Socialbrite)

The post Tricks to ramp up your nonprofit’s Facebook Page appeared first on Socialbrite.