Top tip for a successful Facebook presence

Asked about my top suggestion for brands creating a presence on Facebook, I’d advise carefully planning what you want to do with the people who sign up to your page and how you’ll keep them engaged.

What your reasons for collecting “Likes”? Are you looking to get their e-mail addresses for leads? Have you figured out what kind of an incentive you’ll provide to persuade them to give you that? Are you introducing a new product you want them to check out? Perhaps you want them to make a particular purchase? Or regular purchases? Maybe you want to get them in the habit of checking your site for your new content or latest promotions? Maybe even every day? Are you intent on communicating a branding or re-branding strategy? Just trying to generate some good will toward creating brand evangelists? Try to come with the most specific objectives you can — things you can measure.

Get them to ‘Like’ you and to interact with you

Then there are lots of examples out there of ways to get people to click the Like button: contests, freebies, promotions, gifting, discounts, events, and more. While people love all those kinds of things, clarifying your ultimate goal shapes the content you’ll broadcast to them once you have them. When your content starts appearing in their News Feeds, your challenge is to keep them interacting with you. You may garner a million Likes with your acquisition efforts, but if you don’t back them up with the ability to get ongoing Likes, Comments, and Shares for the content you send out to them, they’ll fall off your broadcast. They still appear in your list of people who like you; but they will stop seeing your content. Here’s the way the Facebook algorithm works: If people don’t continue to indicate their interest, you fall off their radar screen.

Keep them motivated to respond

So how do you keep your fans engaged once you have them?  You’re going to have to put yourself in their shoes. Think about what moves you to comment. Often, it’s deep relevance to your interests, controversy, humor, emotion, or even particular personalities whose efforts to reach out are so charming that you can’t resist! What this implies is that you’ll have to do a lot more than send out a daily update about your company. Reach out to your fans as people, recognizing that you’re only one item in their News Feeds, which they check to keep up and to have fun. Be timely, entertaining, useful — and frame everything in a way that encourages response.

Part of your effort here will be to move people toward the objective you’ve planned for them–toward your site, toward purchase, toward giving you information about them, or moving them to tell others about you. The other part will be to keep them pressing the Like button on the content you send out to them — or commenting on it, or sharing it with others.

Even if your content really doesn’t have anything directly to do with your brand or product, if people enjoy or appreciate it enough to engage with it, your broadcast stays visible to them longer, giving your brand- or company-related content a much better chance of being seen — and acted on. Make sure your editorial calendar includes both types of posts to ensure you support your strategy.