Facebook Page Tips to Increase Fans

Michael Stelzner, host of the podcast Social Media Marketing, recently interviewed Holly Homer from KidsActivitiesBlog.com to talk about her successful Facebook page. Go here to listen to the full podcast: Facebook Organic Growth: How to Defy the Odds and Grow a Huge Facebook Community!

Key Points for Librarians:

SHARE IT (OR NOT):

- You do not need to share everything, just the topics that have viral potential. It hurts you to post topics that people will not respond to -- Facebook will show less of your posts to your fans.

- Expand your content to link outside of your organization to other pages and websites. Share the love, and keep your page fresh.

ANALYZE IT:

- Pay attention to Facebook Insights: "The People Talking About This" and "Reach" numbers. You can see this on any page (just click on the arrow in the "PEOPLE" column on the left side of the page).

- If you share someone else's post that has a higher Talking About / Reach number, Facebook will give you good Karma and show your post to more of your fans.

WORK IT:

- She posts 26 times a day, but most of her fans only see 3 or 4 posts since Facebook does not show everything to all fans. (Which also means that it doesn't matter WHEN you post since Facebook may not show it to fans until hours later...) She waits three weeks to recycle posts and ALL have beautiful high quality pictures. Sometimes, she needs to make them for other blogs that she's reposting. As she points out, people do not mind beautiful pictures in their newsfeed, so it works to her advantage when she posts frequently. [EDIT: Talking to other library leaders, I have learned that we should only be posting twice a day - once in the morning and once at night. The difference, I think, between libraries and this particular page is our audience. Her audience is probably following a lot of pages, so there's more competition. Our library patrons are most likely not that savvy, so they see more of our posts than her audience does.]

- She posts 2/3 outside content and 1/3 from her blog. She also posts three questions a day from readers and let fans answer it.

- She learned that writing a quick introduction in capitals resonated well with her audience. Space. Provide the Link. Space. Description. You will know what your audience likes, too, by seeing what posts do well in your Facebook Insights. Try new things, wait two weeks, and see what worked well. Adapt!

- Using these strategies, Holly's Facebook page went from 7,000 fans to 530,000 fans in eight months.

There you go - I hope it was five minutes well spent!  It was a fantastic podcast, if this is an area you are very interested in. I highly recommend listening to it or checking out the show notes.