Target audience: Marketing professionals, SEO specialists, nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, Web publishers, organizations with a Facebook page.

Guest post by Scott Ayres
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Want some solid advice on how to use a Facebook page for your nonprofit or organization? Then you’ve come to the right place. Here are 19 do’s and don’ts for Facebook pages.

Here’s what to do with your Facebook page

• Keep posts short and sweet – Posts with fewer than 100 characters (not words!) get more engagement. Why do you think Twitter is only 140 characters?
• Answer questions and respond to posts– Your page is not a walled garden! Respond to your followers and be personal.
• Ask questions and ask for feedback – The best posts on Facebook pages tend to be questions. Ask them often and listen to what your users are saying.
• Participate in the conversation – Customers appreciate business owners who take interest.
• Provide helpful links — Be sure to help educate your fans, not just promote your products.
• Follow thought leaders — Find people in your niche and follow them — and make sure to interact with them and their followers.
• Run promotions – Offer specials, coupons and limited-time offers.
• Keep supporters and customers informed – If your shop’s going to be closed, let your constituents know ahead of time. If you’re an online company, keep people informed of outages that may be coming or have occurred.
• Post photos – If you’re a local nonprofit or company, post pictures of your organization and employees. People love to recognize someone around town or in your store or office that they saw online.
• Say thank you – Thank your followers and fans often. Make them the center of your focus.

Here’s what not to do with your Facebook page

Don’t do the following:

• Overpost – Only post as often as you can get good engagement.
• Excessively self-promote – I go by the 90/10 rule: 90% of your posts should be fun and informative, 10% can be promotional.
• Use bad grammar – Make sure you don’t have any grammatical errors or misspelled words in your posts. The grammar police will be on to you!
• Be shy – This is your opportunity to speak directly to your customers. Be outgoing and engaging.
• Overshare – Don’t post rants or gripe about employees or customers. Some things need not be shared on Facebook.
• Talk politics or religion – Have your opinions, yes. But you’ll run off over half your potential supporters or customers if you take a stand on political or religious issues. So choose your words wisely.
• Respond hastily – Remember that your messages are public. Well thought-out and correct answers are vital.
• Bad mouth competitors – You may think the competing burger joint down the street sucks — and they might. But don’t air your opinions on social media about it. It just makes you look juvenile.
• Share secrets — You don’t have to tell everyone all of your secrets. Some things need to stay in house and not be aired on social media. Plus, if you share every problem you have, your supporters or customers will lose faith in you.

Follow these tips as you see fit. Your reputation depends on you using social media the right way! What do you think?

The post 19 do’s and don’ts of Facebook marketing appeared first on Socialbrite.

Adopt a new perspective to get past Facebook’s marketing challenges

It seems that most brands and nonprofits are still trying to get their head around what works on Facebook.

Looking at what content works best, what time to publish updates, and how to use sponsored stories are consistent themes being discussed among nonprofit marketers.

Yet these issues are just symptoms of bigger challenges that we all need to better understand.

Following are five reasons why Facebook marketing is presenting new and/or unusual challenges:

You’re still thinking push

1You’d think that social media would have changed the mass-production push mentality that’s been so pervasive since the Industrial Revolution. But it hasn’t.

Facebook, and most social media for that matter, is still viewed as a free email list to be “targeted” and marketed to.

To amp things up on Facebook, you have to flip this mindset 180 degrees and instead think about creating a space for your supporters to share what matters to them.

Start asking:

• What’s their agenda?
• What are they already putting out there that’s in sync with your cause?
• How can you capture that on your Facebook Page?

You need to understand people

2Google tells you what people are searching for in the form of words typed into a little search box. It’s literally spelled out for you. Not so with Facebook.

What makes Facebook users share, comment and like is still very much a mystery.

You need to look for patterns in Facebook Insights and make inferences based on those patterns. You need to actually understand the emotional drivers of your people!

You’re competing with their friends

3Think about the last time you opened up Facebook on your laptop or mobile device. Was it to find out what your favorite brands were sharing? Exactly.

It’s the same thing with your supporters. Every time you publish an update in their news feed, you’re competing with birth announcements, political rants, vacation pictures and recommended bands.

Remember that you’ll never trump someone’s friends, but the more you can come across with a friend-like voice, the better you’ll do.

You’re competing for attention

4Facebook users are constantly distracted. They might have the best intentions to view an update they were notified about by email, but as soon as they open up Facebook, they see more notifications in the menu and in their friends lists. They see a dog dressed up as little red riding hood. They see other ads that are also competing for their attention.

Capturing — and recapturing — people’s attention will always be a challenge on Facebook.

You’re dealing with mobile devices

5Every other challenge mentioned here happens within an even smaller space on mobile devices. Did you know that each image you post on your Facebook Page takes up the entire screen on an iPhone?

Yes, there are fewer elements to distract users, but there’s also less space you’re competing for.

Curiosity and creativity are the keys

Most of the challenges here are not insurmountable, but sometimes they feel that way. The best way forward is to have a solid understanding of how to best use Facebook for your organization.

What challenges have you seen through marketing on Facebook?

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