Why you need a variety of strategies to keep fans interested in your cause

Target audience: Nonprofits, foundations, NGOs, cause organizations, businesses, brands, social media managers, Web publishers, individuals.

Guest post by Jon Loomer
Digital marketing consultant, JonLoomer.com

The secret to a successful Facebook page is a highly engaged community. You can drive thousands of fans with ads, but the number will be hollow if they aren’t active and engaged.

Why is this important? An engaged fan who interacts with your page is developing a loyalty for your brand. By being actively involved in your page, they are aware of your product launches and special deals, and are therefore more likely to purchase. Just as important, an actively engaged fan is sharing your brand with their friends, thereby expanding your fan base.

Engage, engage, engage. It’s been said so many times that the word is losing meaning. So what does this mean? Here are several examples of how to engage fans on your Facebook page, but feel free to get creative.

Be interesting
1 This may be easier said than done, but only post information that is interesting to your customers. Make sure it’s relevant and timely. If you’re not sure what your customers like, ask them!

Be human
2 Feature the humanness of your brand. Post with a personality, feature photos and videos of staff members, and show another side of your organization. Along the same lines, no one wants to follow an endless PR stream. People don’t trust PR. Be authentic and honest. Recognize mistakes and involve your customers in the solutions.

A more literal way to “be human” is not to use automated services to post to your page. This isn’t interesting. Most such services don’t allow you to add personal description to the post. People easily sniff it out, especially since these posts are highlighted with a third party icon. Studies have shown that posts made with third party services — automated or not — are less successful.

Prompt a response
3 An engaged fan is someone who not only reads your content but actively comments, likes and shares. How do you get that response? Ask for it! Ask questions in your posts. Ask for fan feedback. Get their opinions. Ask them to share your content. Ask them to recommend your page to their friends. These are your most loyal customers. Involve them!

Be brief
4 Don’t write a book. Whether you’re providing a description of a link you’re sharing or writing a status update, get to the point. Short posts have a clearer purpose and are much more likely to receive a response.

Share a variety of content
5 Mix it up. Share links, video and photos. Include the occasional status update, but you can’t rely only on that type of post. The most viral types of content on Facebook are photos and videos. If you share a link, make sure that it has a corresponding thumbnail image that is interesting. People are much more likely to read a link that has an interesting thumbnail image than content that does not.

Share exclusive content
6 You need to provide value to being a fan of your page. It’s more than just being interesting and human. Provide content that your fans can’t get anywhere else. Share information about your company that isn’t available on your website or blog. Provide exclusive behind-the-scenes content. And if you sell a product, share exclusive deals available only to Facebook fans.

Use questions
7 Want to get feedback from your fans? Use the built-in Questions app by Facebook. Keep questions short (longer questions are cut off) and make sure you have a clear goal. It’s usually to find out more about your customers or what they want.

But also feel free to use this to help customers make decisions about your brand or your page. If you’re a restaurant, poll them on what menu item should get a special Facebook fan price. Ask them to vote on the name of a new product. Involve them in big decisions to help give them a sense of ownership in your brand.

Use events
8 Having a big event you’re looking to promote? Launching a new product? Use Facebook’s Events. This built-in app allows you to make events more official. When fans and non-fans respond with an RSVP or an indication they can’t attend, it also gives you an idea for an expected turnout.

Of course, it’s more than knowing who will be there. Like with anything else, when you engage your fans and get them to respond, that information is shared with their friends. So by creating an Event that generates a response, you increase the potential for reaching a new audience.

Encourage check-ins
9 Do you have a physical location that relies on foot traffic? Encourage check-ins. It’s one more way for your fans to interact with your brand. Remind them with signs at your store. Maybe even provide incentives. Once again, this engagement has benefits that go beyond building a relationship with this customer. That person is telling his or her friends where they are. Whether or not their friends join them, the check-in acts as a recommendation from your fans.

Recognize fans
10 You need your fans. Remind them that you appreciate them. Thank them for liking your page and for being a customer. Highlight milestones when you reach a certain number of fans. Have a Fan of the Week feature. Find ways to recognize your most loyal fans and thank them for their involvement with your brand.

Hold contests
11 Every once in a while, get your fans excited with a giveaway or some other contest. Of course, Facebook has some specific rules about holding contests on your page. Make sure you follow them. But a good contest is an excellent way to build some buzz around your brand, add value to liking your page and reach a larger audience.

Encourage user-generated content
12 Your page shouldn’t be only about your brand, it’s also about your customers. Ask your fans to share their own stories, photos or even videos that reflect their interaction with your organization. When they go to your restaurant, ask them to take a picture of their meal and share it on your wall or with their friends. Make your wall a combination of your posts and posts from fans by encouraging user-generated content.

Be consistent
13 Your fans need to know what to expect. Don’t post twice a day for two weeks and then go quiet for the next two. You need to be consistent. That could mean creating a content plan. Schedule out what you’re going to do a week or two in advance. It could also mean having a specific theme for each day of the week you post. You don’t need to post every day. You may only post a couple of times per week. But be consistent.

Target by location or language
14 If you’re a local company or if your message is the same for everyone, this may not be useful. But if you are an international, national or even regional company, targeting may be useful. Maybe you’re promoting an event or special that applies only to a specific area. You don’t want to annoy your fans in the areas where this isn’t relevant. So when posting, click the lock and then customize. From there, you can choose to target your message by country, state, city or language.

That’s a start …

There are certainly other ways to engage with your fan base and keep them involved with your brand. But this should be a good start.

What other creative methods have you used to keep your fans interested in your content? What can you add?

The post 14 surefire ways to engage Facebook users appeared first on Socialbrite.

Find out how Facebook can help your nonprofit increase engagement

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, brands, social media managers, marketing professionals, bloggers, individuals.

Ilove the new Facebook Insights. Unlike so many other changes that Facebook has sprung unexpectedly on us, the new Insights is a welcome change. I think it is such a significant change that it is a game-changer in the social media space. If I sound gushy, well, I am. With the new Insights metrics, Facebook is boldly telling the Facebook community and its competitors that the most important social network metric is real online engagement. As I’ve written before, if your page cannot ultimately move people to take action, then your organization is wasting its time with Facebook. Online engagement is how it begins.

Know how engaging your content really is

Everything about the new Facebook Insights is focused on helping page administrators understand how well their page’s content is being received, shared, and talked about within Facebook. No longer do we have to count up Likes, fan posts to walls, and comments on posts, and pull together the online engagement percentage. And what’s more, we can dive deep, very deep, by post. By who is seeing the posts, and where. By how the content is being shared, and what type of content is being shared. That’s just the beginning. The Facebook metric that matters now is engagement. Here are but three examples of how Facebook is highlighting engagement.

Likes vs. PTAT (People Talking About This)

Think about the bold statement Facebook is making when it shows this publicly on every Facebook page, for all to note:

In one glance, which number is more important? With simplicity and sharpness, Facebook turned the Like numbers game into a “how many really care” numbers game. Brilliant.

Engagement by post

You can also drill down by post. New Insights is designed to help you understand which posts created the most Reach (impressions, who saw it), or highest number of Engaged Users (who clicked on it), or highest number of those who Talked About This (Liked, shared it, commented on a post). The old Insights offered a blanket number of impressions and feedback percentage by wall post, which merely offered a sense of reach and interest. A post like this one (below), which 2,200+ Facebook users could have seen, only had 56 clicks on it and 9 users who commented or Liked the post. The real engagement metric on this post is 56. And nine people who were really engaged.

What types of posts are the most engaging? Figure that out and improve your PTAT score (People Talking About This). Go get ’em!

Understanding how your content engages people

I also love that you can tell which of the wall posts took off due to either organic, paid or viral traffic. Look at those posts, figure out what happened there, and create more content like that. Understand the difference between the posts that “go viral” and those that are seen because of organic traffic. Greater reach ultimately will attract new fans and people Talking About your page and posts.

So this is the future of measurement. Thank goodness. Facebook has made the first move in this direction. It’s is a great start.

Twitter, YouTube, Google+, you’re next.

Related

• How to use the new Facebook Insights (John Haydon in Socialbrite)

• Guide to social media metrics — social influence measurements, social media ROI, stats to measure on Facebook and Twitter, metrics and analytics tools & more

• How to understand Daily Active Users in Facebook Insights

The post Get deep into engagement with the new Facebook Insights appeared first on Socialbrite.

Participation is the key for getting value out of your Facebook Pages

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, brands, businesses, Web publishers, individuals.

I‘ve been digging deep into research about Facebook fan activity lately, in preparation for a few upcoming presentations about social media return on engagement and Facebook engagement. I was delighted to find recent research about Facebook fan engagement from Michael Wu at Lithium and from comScore. Placed together, this research offers three very practical takeaways for nonprofits and brands managing Facebook fan Pages: relevant benchmarks of how deeply fans engage with Pages, the effect of fans on website visits, and how likely fans are to engage with your organization’s services or purchase items.

Basic benchmarks for measuring fan activity

1Michael Wu posits that “fan count is only the most superficial characterization of engagement, because it says nothing about the fans’ subsequent action and their interactions.” To measure the real engagement of a fan Page, Michael looked at different levels of fan engagement: active fans (who comment or post a message on a page), what fraction of posts have comments, amount of interaction among fans on a Page, and number of unique fans per conversation. From his research, he found these Page engagement benchmarks:

• The number of active fans per day (i.e. actively engaging) is about 3.45% of total page fans.
• About two-thirds of all posts do receive some activity, but it is normal to expect that around one-third will never receive comments and disappear quickly from a person’s newsfeed.
• Most Facebook fans are not very loyal to the fan Pages. Only about 30% of the active fans re-engage with the fan Page more than once (i.e. through posting).
• The probability of a fan returning to the same conversation on the fan Page is low, only about 9.6%.

If a fan never interacts with your Page’s content, then the reach of the Page will never grow, either. The more interactions, the more friends of fans will see your content. This correlates to the comScore research, next.

The role of the newsfeed

2Facebook users primarily interact with a fan Page in the newsfeed. What this means is that most fans don’t ever visit the actual fan Page. How often a fan or a friend of a fan will see your Page content within the newsfeed is determined by how often the actual post is shared, interacted with, and Liked. (See J.D. Lasica’s article for an in-depth look at how EdgeRank works.)

The new comScore report “The Power of Like” offers solid data on why fan activity with a Page is so important: reach. This report is focused on how people interact with the top 100 brands, with deeper analysis of a few large brands.

• Facebook users spend 25% of their time on Facebook interacting with their newsfeed. In May, 27 percent of engagement on Facebook.com occurred on the homepage and newsfeed, followed by profile viewing (21 percent), photo viewing (17 percent) and usage of apps and tools (10 percent).
• Facebook users are 40 to 150 times more likely to see branded content in the newsfeed than to visit the fan Page itself.
• Friends of fans is an important potential segment for organizations to reach. Friends of fans typically represent a much larger set of consumers (34 times larger, on average, for the top 100 brand pages) and may receive social media brand impressions through their Facebook friends. In the graph below, you can see that for every fan that visits Starbucks’ Facebook fan Page, 156 others see the brand Page’s updates through the newsfeed.

To reach more friends of fans, post to Facebook more frequently. Each incremental day of publishing branded content from the Facebook Page increases the reach among fans by about 2.5 percent.

Facebook fans equal website visitors

3Big implications here for nonprofits! Fans and friends of fans are much more likely to visit an organization’s website than the average Internet user. In the comScore report, for example, Bing fans are 55% more likely to visit the website and friends of Bing fans are 33% more likely to visit the website than the average Internet user. Other research shows that consumers use a combination of search and social media to research before making a purchase, and the effect of exposure of a brand to likelihood to purchase.

Interestingly, the comScore report shows that fans and friends of fans are more likely to spend more per transaction at the store and to have more frequent transactions. I believe you can reasonably assume from the data that those who Like your page are more likely to take these actions.

While Facebook engagement data from Lithium tells us a lot about how fans engage with your Page’s content, the comScore data illustrates how engaging data can potentially affect website visits, purchasing, and engagement with your organization’s services. The key, of course, is creating engaging, relevant, shareable content.

How does this data compare with your experience managing and/or interacting with a fan Page?

Resources

• Quantifying Facebook Engagement: More than Just Counting Fans and Like (Michael Wu, Lithium)

• 

Are Your Facebook Fans Real Fans? (Michael Wu, Lithium)

• The Power of Like: How Brands Reach and Influence Fans Through Social Media Marketing (comScore)

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

The post Nonprofits: Are your Facebook fans engaged? appeared first on Socialbrite.