Companies and businesses usually encounter a lot of difficulties while trying to promote their products and services on Facebook. While it is easier and more effective to engage customers and clients on Twitter, Facebook isn’t without merit. However, most companies tend to use it wrongly and not optimize their content correctly.
Facebook Is Different from Other Social Networks
Facebook requires a different kind of engagement and is inherently a very different platform when compared with LinkedIn or Twitter. Facebook is more personal, and requires a certain sense of affection towards those who are fans of your business page. The page administrator needs to understand that Facebook optimization depends upon many factors including the kind of post that is shared, the time when it shared and the language that is used.
Facebook is a very visual platform. IT may not be as visual as Pinterest or Instagram but it certainly started as a place where people shared each other’s photographs and left comments or liked each others photographs. That tradition still continues to this day and it holds good for business pages as well.
Sharing Photos Is the Most Important Way to Optimize Facebook Engagement
Morgan J. Arnold wrote in a post titled “Optimizing Facebook Engagement – Text, Links, Photos or Videos?” that photos are the single most form of media that received the highest number of likes. Strangely, most companies tend to share links and let Facebook extract a thumbnail and an excerpt to do the rest of the work. According to his article, links received the least number of likes though this is the most preferred method of sharing content on Facebook.
Obviously, you will need to change your paradigm and begin to share images more than anything else. The second most popular form of content was questions followed by status updates. Videos did not fare well and stood almost next to links in terms of being unpopular. Thus, companies and business may want to share photos of employees, of events and parties, of conferences, of any other situation that can creatively substitute a link.
While sharing a photo, a link can be attached alongside, and a direct request can be made to fans to click on that link and visit that page for more information on that photograph. You might even want to ask questions about your fans preferences, likes and attitudes, as questions receive a lot of engagement from fans.
When to Share Facebook Updates
While sharing photographs and questions is a great idea, the time when it is shared is also very important. Most fans tend to be online on weekends and posts that were shared during weekends received 16% higher engagement. Also, sharing contents during evenings is better than sharing them during business hours. In order to share content at the best time possible, you might want to use a service such as Buffer or Hootsuite, which allow you to schedule your social media messages.
Moreover, Hootsuite and Buffer App allow you to understand your audience and track social media engagement. Last but not the least; direct communication with your fans is very important. It is not wrong to directly ask your fans to like your status or photograph. In fact, research shows that when you directly request for likes, people actually like your photograph or status message.
Using Instagram to Optimize Facebook Engagement
One of the better strategies is to employ Instagram while sharing images. Though Instagram is not used often by companies to share images and worthy photographs, it is a powerful social image editing tool that can be sued for your benefit and cross posted to Facebook. Any image that you plan to share on Facebook can be shared on Instagram first and set up auto-sharing so that it appears on your Facebook page as well. This allows your photographs to be given a touch of vintage effects, while utilizing the powerful social medium that Instagram already is. Of course, you can always customize your captions and messages to suit your Facebook fans.
The bottom-line is, you should share content that is interesting and make sure that is more often in the form of images. Links do not fetch as many likes as photos do, and it matters at what time you post your updates on Facebook. Weekends and evenings are the best times to share images on Facebook. One can utilize social media tools like Hootsuite and Buffer App to automate updates. It is also advisable to directly ask fans to like statuses and photos.
