Very illuminating. Apparently I’m doing ok. I’m at 644 likes with an engagement rate of just over 7%. And I do veeeery little paid advertising.
I do most of what you’ve suggested here. 1 post a day, mixing up the media. Strangely though (and I saw someone else mention the same thing the other day) I get more engagement on text rather and pics and video. They’re not far behind, but interesting text comments have been out-pulling on all the stats. Maybe a picture with that interesting text would have pulled even better? Who knows.
Though I’ve had a terrible time getting people to interact with things I want them to do. Like listen to a song or read a blog post. Much smaller engagement on that stuff. And of course, those usually link off Facebook too, which FB ranks lower.
One trick I’ve found though is write a status update mentioning the post and then put the actual link to the post in a comment right after. It’s doubled the exposure most times.
I have also found posting once a day has been helpful. I would add to that, that after trying different times of day, I’ve also found 9am to give the most consistent results. I’ve also started adding pictures to our text and that has driven up engagement – often it isn’t even about the photo, but that visual element seems to make the text pop more.
One more little facebook hack I have discovered is that we hit a plateau in our likes and i wanted to see more significant growth quickly. I ended up doing an exchange with several of my friends where I made them admins on my page and they invited ALL of their friends to like our page. Then I did the same for them. The first week we did this, we got over 300 new likes with very little effort. 🙂
Thanks so much for adding this feedback! That’s great that you discovered when your fans are most engaged and ran with it. This time frame changes for everyone because every fan base is different, but if you can identify your fans (as you clearly have) then you’ll start to see the results increase in a big way!
Thanks for breaking it out Jon & Ariel. These are easy to follow tips. Points 1 & 2 are underlined for me by the fact that I get 10x engagement on a lazy Spinal Tap video post than I do my ‘engaging, fact-filled’ text posts. Clearly need to turn more posts up to 11.
I would say when adding a YouTube or non-facebook video, post an image that looks like the video and then put a link to the video in the image description. Luke Davids has been testing this on his music page and those posts perform better than posting a YouTube link along. Posted an example below from the timeline and newsfeed so you can see how it appears in both.
This is REALLY great information. I have exercised all of these on my own companies page. I must say, it has been a slow, steady climb. Key word there is STEADY. It would be interesting to see this same article only showcasing other social networks (twitter, youtube, myspace, etc.) Thanks for the info guys!
As I was reading over this, I was also on Facebook, and it occurred to me that a reason for little or no engagement might be that there’s no reason to engage. If you post gig information, and you are clear about it, such as including the date, venue, time and ticket price, people may read it, but have no reason to engage. There aren’t any questions for them to ask or answer. Maybe adding a question, even something simple like who is coming, or what covers people would like to hear would help engagement ?
The results could have been skewed by the post itself. Considering the self-centeredness of human nature, most people would gladly jump on the opportunity to be followed by you.
I get “Your Page’s post is performing better than 95% other posts on that page. Promote it to get even better results” nearly every day. This is false advertising on facbooks behalf. It is a fraudulent statement that they spam me with. It is because of this message that I have 0 faith in facebook. I used to reach all my fans and for a small business that was great.
I would also mention that while facebook admits to having about 6% fake profiles in its system I would believe the number is closer to 50%. I at one time had 8 profiles for a game and as a group owner of 5 groups with over 10k members each at least if not more then half of all people wanting to join are fake. Because of this facebook will not get my money.
Very illuminating. Apparently I’m doing ok. I’m at 644 likes with an engagement rate of just over 7%. And I do veeeery little paid advertising.
I do most of what you’ve suggested here. 1 post a day, mixing up the media. Strangely though (and I saw someone else mention the same thing the other day) I get more engagement on text rather and pics and video. They’re not far behind, but interesting text comments have been out-pulling on all the stats. Maybe a picture with that interesting text would have pulled even better? Who knows.
Though I’ve had a terrible time getting people to interact with things I want them to do. Like listen to a song or read a blog post. Much smaller engagement on that stuff. And of course, those usually link off Facebook too, which FB ranks lower.
One trick I’ve found though is write a status update mentioning the post and then put the actual link to the post in a comment right after. It’s doubled the exposure most times.
Hey Phil – 7% is killer! Great job! Thanks for contributing with this feedback 🙂
That last trick seems really useful. I’m going to start using it. Thanks for sharing.
Very helpful, thanks for this! Best engagement for us is always pictures of our fans posted and tagged within 24 hours of an event.
Great idea!! Thanks for sharing guys 🙂
I have also found posting once a day has been helpful. I would add to that, that after trying different times of day, I’ve also found 9am to give the most consistent results. I’ve also started adding pictures to our text and that has driven up engagement – often it isn’t even about the photo, but that visual element seems to make the text pop more.
One more little facebook hack I have discovered is that we hit a plateau in our likes and i wanted to see more significant growth quickly. I ended up doing an exchange with several of my friends where I made them admins on my page and they invited ALL of their friends to like our page. Then I did the same for them. The first week we did this, we got over 300 new likes with very little effort. 🙂
Thanks so much for adding this feedback! That’s great that you discovered when your fans are most engaged and ran with it. This time frame changes for everyone because every fan base is different, but if you can identify your fans (as you clearly have) then you’ll start to see the results increase in a big way!
Thanks for breaking it out Jon & Ariel. These are easy to follow tips. Points 1 & 2 are underlined for me by the fact that I get 10x engagement on a lazy Spinal Tap video post than I do my ‘engaging, fact-filled’ text posts. Clearly need to turn more posts up to 11.
Glad it was helpful Molly! Yes indeed, turn it up to 11! (But wait… couldn’t you just make 10 louder 😉
I would say when adding a YouTube or non-facebook video, post an image that looks like the video and then put a link to the video in the image description. Luke Davids has been testing this on his music page and those posts perform better than posting a YouTube link along. Posted an example below from the timeline and newsfeed so you can see how it appears in both.
This is REALLY great information. I have exercised all of these on my own companies page. I must say, it has been a slow, steady climb. Key word there is STEADY. It would be interesting to see this same article only showcasing other social networks (twitter, youtube, myspace, etc.) Thanks for the info guys!
As I was reading over this, I was also on Facebook, and it occurred to me that a reason for little or no engagement might be that there’s no reason to engage. If you post gig information, and you are clear about it, such as including the date, venue, time and ticket price, people may read it, but have no reason to engage. There aren’t any questions for them to ask or answer. Maybe adding a question, even something simple like who is coming, or what covers people would like to hear would help engagement ?
Hmm…. good post, however…
The results could have been skewed by the post itself. Considering the self-centeredness of human nature, most people would gladly jump on the opportunity to be followed by you.
I promote other peoples posts. My engagement rate goes up and theirs do too
I get “Your Page’s post is performing better than 95% other posts on that page. Promote it to get even better results” nearly every day. This is false advertising on facbooks behalf. It is a fraudulent statement that they spam me with. It is because of this message that I have 0 faith in facebook. I used to reach all my fans and for a small business that was great.
I would also mention that while facebook admits to having about 6% fake profiles in its system I would believe the number is closer to 50%. I at one time had 8 profiles for a game and as a group owner of 5 groups with over 10k members each at least if not more then half of all people wanting to join are fake. Because of this facebook will not get my money.
Everything facebook does is seedy