Well, Facebook picked a fine time to change the way they treat Company Pages… right before I am about to write my portion of this challenge! And I’ll go ahead and confess, I am one unhappy lady with Facebook right now. Let me also mention while I’m at it, that I am one of the co-owners of Hip Homeschool Moms. So my perspective is being shared here on my personal blog (Live and Learn Farm), but my experience is from doing the Social Media for Hip Homeschool Moms. I also need to tell you I make everything a game! So, although I’m mad as fire at Facebook, I’m determined that we are going to figure out how to continue reaching our audience despite this dramatic reduction in organic reach to our audience that took the time to like our page! But before we go there, let’s get some basic items covered up front and get right to our first discussion… Know your audience on Facebook.
Facebook is a Business
I know… that is obvious. But it needs to be stated at the beginning of our discussion about this platform. Just like we are in business to make a living, so are they… and they now have shareholders to answer to. The days of getting a bunch of free advertising are pretty much over on Facebook. That does not mean we need to leave Facebook! Far from it! In my opinion, that would be very short-sighted to consider leaving Facebook. After all, it is still the most popular social media platform on the internet (right now). And, at least for our audience, they are primarily on Facebook. What it does mean is… we all need to get extremely smart with our approach! So what’s a blogger to do?
Know Your Audience
I cannot emphasize this point enough! We have to know our audience, know what makes them want to read our posts, know what they love about our sites (and don’t like so much), know why they share some posts and not others, I mean KNOW them. That is the most important piece of advice I can give you. Period. It doesn’t matter what platform we are talking about. If you don’t know your audience and how to connect with them, you are batting a zero already. Relationships. That is what social media is based on. If you are not developing a relationship with your audience, you are losing them to someone who is!
How do you get to know your Audience?
You spend time with the analytics and numbers from your site. Take some time to study and compare all the analytics from all the platforms you use. Facebook insights are easy to navigate and a treasure trove of information. You can learn so much via the insights that Facebook provides:
- Where your audience is geographically
- What time of day and days of the week your audience most uses Facebook
- The demographics of your audience (age, location, gender)
- The reach each of your posts receive
- What posts garner the most engagement with your audience and what type those posts are (pictures, comments, links, etc.)
- What technology your audience used to view your page
- Details about audience numbers (how many you have gained and lost) and even if they hid a post, all your posts or reported your posts as spam!
- If you pay to have any of your posts boosted, you will see the results compared to organic reach as well.
I am a numbers-aholic, so I track everything. I don’t necessarily recommend you spend more than an hour on this exercise, but I do encourage you to pay special attention to the type of posts, when, and notice what is special about it that helped engagement. Was it a fantastic photograph? A great tag line? A post that was time sensitive? Make note of these items.
Resources to Help you Analyze your Numbers
There are so many resources you can choose from to help you understand your Facebook Analytics and this list is not extensive nor all inclusive. If you have other resources you love to use, please let me know in the comments below.
John Loomer wrote a great article about page insights for Social Media Examiner. I highly recommend you spend some time understanding your metrics
Another site you need to visit that will provide a detailed explanation of how to find the data, download it and understand it is by Web Marketing Today.
The Challenge…
Download and study your numbers for 2014. I know that might be a lot of data… but Facebook is changing! You have to know your data to see the trends! If you are not intimately aware of your numbers, you wont notice the numbers as they shift.
Share Your Thoughts, Tools and Insights
As you are working through my challenges, please share your thoughts and insights in a comment. If you are using different tools that are working, please include those as well. I am not the sage of Facebook social media… I just spend a lot of time analyzing and trying to help grow our Social Media success. So help me learn from you as well! I am just like you, I want to grow my blogs too, ya’ know 🙂
Be sure to read the other posts in this series:
- Day one: Know your Audience
- Day two: Know your Competition
- Day three: The Goal of Social Media
- Day four: Turn Off the Autofeeds
- Day five: Methodically Test Your Posts
- Day six: Testing Which Posts Work
- Day seven: Pay to Play
- Day eight: Be Prepared to Change
- Day nine: Start a Group
- Day ten: Content is King and Social Media His Queen
Be sure to visit the other co-hosts and do their challenges as well!
- Lisa from Squishable Baby wrote a series on Giveaways
- Michelle from Simplify, Live, Love wrote a series on Grammar
- Thaleia from Something 2 Offer wrote a series on Blog Photos and one on Commenting
- Martiel from Amazing Success Academy wrote a series onSEO and one on Blog Titles and Topics
- Honey from Honey’s Life wrote a series on Twitter
Until next time…
Trish Corlew
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Even though I understand Twitter the least I do better on Twitter than I do on Facebook. I post to Facebook more often than Twitter too! I have noticed that I am only reaching about 1/8th of my “likers” but I also have a hard time with getting likers to begin with! The entire social media mess is so confusing and discouraging sometimes. 🙁
I just started my blog Facebook page last month, so I really don’t have much info to go on, but I should by next month.