There have been millions of words written about how to use Facebook to promote a business, cause or collection of funny cat pictures. What I’ve found is that you should really just focus on four words. Study all the words you like, but they won’t do you any good if you haven’t mastered these four.
Do
it
every
day.
Not only is that the most important lesson for benefiting from social media, it seems to be the hardest for people to master.
I’m not saying you should post to your Facebook page every day, or just once a day. Post as often as it makes sense. What you should do every day is log in and spend some brain power on it:
- Look at other Facebook pages for inspiration. Maybe your pizza place can get some good ideas from checking out pages for pizza shops in New York and Chicago. Your campaign to end homelessness isn’t the first, so see what others have done that got a lot of buzz.
- Check the numbers for your recent posts and think about why they performed the way they did. What kind of photos get the most likes? Do they also get the most comments, or is that a different type of post? What about shares?
- Try to figure out what time of day or day of the week your fans are most active. Different demographics have different habits when it comes to social media. Are they lunch break surfers? night owls? busy with other things on the weekend? always connected?
- Identify other pages that might help promote your page. Say you run a page for your food truck. You’ll want to know all the major pages that talk about food trucks in your area.
Do post regularly, though. I’ve seen all too many pages that get updated frequently for a couple weeks and then go silent for a month or more. That does very little to build a loyal following. If I were to pick two more words that are vital to making Facebook work for you, they would be “post regularly.”
You may well not have time to spend on Facebook every day, or it might just not be your thing. If that’s the case, get someone who can. Preferably, get someone who’s passionate about your organization and shows signs of possessing common sense. It also really helps if they can take decent photos or you can supply them with decent photos.
Four final words: Post lots of photos.