Marketing Feed: What to Do With Facebook?

What to do with Facebook…and should you do anything?

I read a reader survey study a few months back that asked readers where they go for information on their favorite authors.  The overwhelming response was Facebook, by a good margin. Given that, it’s impossible to imagine connecting with your fans if you do not have an active page on Facebook.  But creating a page and posting on it sometimes isn’t enough. Facebook doesn’t make it easy for your posts to appear, and their ranking system is every changing.  In other words, you have to work for your ranking.

So for now, here are tips and tricks on how you can work within their system:

This article talks about the EdgeRank in 2014 and what to expect from it.  The cliffnotes version:

• Memes are out, quality images are in
• Text links in the status box are out, link shares are in
• New content rules over old content — and gets better placement, too

Facebook measures and values content according to its own ratings.  These notes let you know how Facebook is ranking certain kinds of content.  So those funny ecards that you post? Or cat memes? They are devalued as far as ranking on the News feed goes.  That isn’t to say you can’t and shouldn’t post them — especially if your audience engages with them.  But they aren’t likely to rank you higher in the News feed, which is where your posts need to be in order to be seen.

This article offers 5 tips on how to get your content visible.  The bottom line:  You want engagement.  The more engagement you have on your page with your fans, the higher your ranking.

Why are they making changes?  We’re constantly tired of how often Facebook changes what we feel isn’t broken.  These are their words as to why they continue to shift the ground of their news feed and how it works.

Their bottom line goal: Your interaction on the site.  They want you posting, so they are offering you the content that makes you more likely to post.  “Through testing, we have found that when people see more text status updates on Facebook they write more status updates themselves….. Over time, we noticed that this effect wasn’t true for text status updates from Pages. As a result, the latest update to News Feed ranking treats text status updates from Pages as a different category to text status updates from friends.”

This article on QuickSprout offers ways to study the Facebook engagement of the fans of other pages.  This article claims it’s “stealing” fans, but one thing about readers — if they love a genre, they’ll buy as many books in that genre as interest them.  So you can certainly pull information from the pages of other authors and learn from what they do well.  There is no stealing here, only offering more content to them on a topic they love.  There are some great tools mentioned here that can help you study other pages that have engagement, what engagement they have and offer you a way to target those fans to add to your list.

You do not have to be a slave to your social media.  Spend the time when it fits into your schedule and plan your posts ahead.  With Facebook, you can use the scheduling feature to write a handful of posts for the week and let them publish on separate days.  Use your time wisely.

If you want to take your scheduling to the next step, consider BUFFER. (I use it religiously.)  Another option is Hootsuite.  Not everyone is online at the same time, and if you’re sending out all of your tweets and posts only when you’re online? You’re missing a large portion of your audience.  Use Buffer to schedule your posts ahead of time so you’re using social media on YOUR time. One of the best features of Buffer is the browser extension that allows you to clip articles from anywhere on the web.   Stay tuned in coming weeks for a more indepth look at Buffer app.

Need some new content ideas? Social media tools? Here’s a list of 29 Free Marketing Tools to Improve Your Work Today.

I’m constantly looking at new themes for Wordpress (because I’m a geek) and because I like to find things useful to recommend to others, since I’m no longer designing websites.    Here’s a great theme I ran across – very feminine.  This theme is responsive, offers a few color options, includes a slider, and customization options inside the dashboard, so you don’t need to know code.

 

In my search for some great fonts this week, I found a great article that talks about the best fonts of 2013 that you can download for free. (Check licenses to see if that’s free for personal or commercial usage.)

The Gabriela font is a great one. I’m a sucker for a great ampersand and this one is tops:

Until next time!