By Janet Fouts
Facebook seems simple. After all your Mom is using it, right? There are a lot of reasons your Facebook page isn't getting the rabid fan-base you think it deserves. With
Graph Search rolling out it's going to be even more important to fine-tune your page to get those fans engaged and make your business more social. Here are the top six reasons for lackluster fan pages we see on a regular basis.
Inexperienced manager
In reality though, it takes someone who knows how to activate a community to attract, engage and keep your fans and encourage them to share with their friends so they become fans too. While it may seem some community managers spend an inordinate amount of time coming up with cute e-cards and photos, if you look carefully, and study when and what they post, you will see a method to the madness. Posts aren't really random at all. They're carefully timed and balanced between posts that make people laugh, think and engage. They take into consideration the times the community responds to posts best. All together it tells a story.
Posting too much about YOU and not enough about your FANS
In general only 20 percent of the posts you put on your page should be about you and your brand. I know, that's hard to swallow, but are you advertising? Get a billboard.
A good community manager is always on the lookout for ways to nurture the community and support them as well as your brand. Managing the content so you spread the love brings fans back again and again and makes them feel part of a community instead of a target to market at.
Oblivious to who your fans are
This is very common. When was the last time you looked at the profile of a fan? What are their interests? What kinds of post do they share? Do they have a blog you could share with your community? Knowing your community takes time and research, but it pays off big in loyal fans.
Not responding to requests, questions, posts
If you aren't talking back to us we just figure you've checked out. Respond to questions as quickly as possible. Resist the urge to delete a negative comment. Instead look at it as an opportunity to engage the user, make them happy and turn them into evangelists. When someone compliments you, say thank you. Then go see how you can return the favor.
Posting too much
Flooding your fan's news feeds with content makes them tune you out. It also causes Facebook to wonder if anybody cares about you but you. If you don't get great engagement in the first place, and most of the posts are from you, you will likely lose page rank, stop showing up in the news feeds of your fans. Basically, you're dead to them. We recommend a post a day until you get good engagement and then, depending on how many fans you have and how engaged they are, you can step it up to 2 or even 3 posts per day. Don't forget to spread those posts out over the day, not dump them all in your timeline at once.
Not posting enough
Did you forget you have a Facebook page? Post like mad at first, then decide nobody cared so you quit posting? Nobody is going to care about what you have to say if you clearly don't care about your page. Try for once a day, twice a week is a bare minimum.
You forgot to tell people
How are you letting people know you have a facebook page? Is it in your emails, on your website, in your brochures? Don't forget to add the address too, it's not as intuitive as you might think for people to search for you. They just might find a similar product and quit looking for you altogether.
Janet Fouts is a social media coach who helps individuals and corporations figure out how to use social media as part of their outreach and marketing program. She's a frequent speaker at conferences, conduct workshops training sessions and webinars around social media and online marketing and has authored three books on social media, "Social Media Success," "#Socialmedia PR tweet," and "#Socialmedia Nonprofit tweet."
TatuDigital is a full service inbound marketing agency, co-founded by Fouts.
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