I’d like to share a thought before we get to the type of posts you might want to explore. Remember we are trying to get to know our audience. Our Facebook audience may not be the same (and probably isn’t) as your blog’s audience nor the other social media platforms. Each platform brings its own unique audience. Each can drive traffic to your website and encourage growth on that specific social media platform. But, again, each are unique animals. In order to know what works, you must start testing which posts work and which ones don’t and you must test them For Each Platform. Remember, I am only really focusing on Facebook, so my suggestions and ideas will not necessarily work for Google+ or Twitter. But the concept of testing will. Now, back to your regularly scheduled article about boosting your blog via Facebook….

I keep talking about “types of posts”, what do I mean? Well there are several different “flavors” of posts.  A good variety of all of these posts would be smart, but some will resonate more with your audience than others. How do we know which ones will work better… yep, you guessed it… testing them! 🙂 

Challenge: Test Which Posts Work best for YOUR Audience.

1. Easy to answer Questions.

These are designed to get your audience talking. I honestly HATE stupid questions, so I rarely ask the easy ones… but I do ask who their day is going, what’s for dinner (usually when I’m hungry), what they are doing at various times of the day, what field trips they are doing this week, etc.

2. Crowd-sourcing Questions.

For our Facebook page, we get a TON of questions from homeschoolers (and potential homeschoolers). Instead of answering them ourselves, we pose them to our audience. Homeschool moms love to help each other and all of us have opinions, so these questions usually get a ton of engagement. One thing I personally need to get better about is engaging among the answers. It is so easy to just post the question and move on… but honestly, we need to be involved. We need to know our page is not being used for inappropriate content, spam, and not the least of which… unpaid advertisements. So, this is one of my goals this year: to stay more involved once the question is posed and our moms are answering it.

3. Links to your blog.

Again, it would be easy to just post the link and the title and move on. But what I’m finding is that this is not going to get much engagement usually. We try really hard to not have exotic titles on our posts… but we can certainly use them on Facebook to pique interest. We are testing everything right now, so test what gets the best audience participation. Don’t forget to drive traffic to your website by providing blog posts to answer some of these questions.

4. Pictures.

For our page, funny pictures by far are the most shared posts. Usually something that not only homeschool moms, but moms in general identify with. But the posts that get the most conversation going are personal pictures of our team when they are doing the social media that day. Real life homeschooling in action. Share some of who you are and what your page is about… genuine and real-life items are loved by our followers. See if that works for you.

5. Links to Other Articles.

Be a good steward of information. Yes, your audience likes you and what you are doing… but, as good as you are, there are others pages that have great information… why not share their articles too? I think we all need to stop being so competitive and start working together to help each other. I am the epitome of a Type A competitive personality so I understand how hard that is… but turn that competitiveness on yourself.  Try to beat your numbers for last month, your numbers of page views, your newsletter subscribers, etc. It will benefit all of us in the long run if we develop cooperative relationships and help our audience be more successful.

6. Quotes by Leaders in Your Field.

These can be either pictures or just the quote typed in as a status. With our audience, these get shared. Especially ones that inspire them, encourage them, challenge them or they identify with. I have a few that I always search for first for education. Again, we are testing everything right now, so see who your audience likes, if they will share quotes from the status or if pictures do better. Being methodical!

7. Videos.

This is another area that I’m not doing a great job of posting. I am posting our Mentoring Moms’ Hangouts each week, but other than that…. not much. So, this is one area we all need to test. Do you use a lot of videos on your page? Share your experiences below!

8. Infographics.

This type of post is one that seems to still be extremely popular.  If you create your own infographics, even better… Our audience loves to see research about how successful (as a whole) homeschooling is when stacked up against about any other form of education. They like to see the demographics in easy to understand grids. They like to see how others are homeschooling. Again, you need to know your own audience to determine if these work for you… but try them and see!

I’m sure there are others that I didn’t think to add. Do you have suggestions that I didn’t include? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!

One final note… there is another big question that seems to be asked and answered a lot … How often to post?  I think you are getting my point by now… I can’t answer that for you (nor can anyone else that is not an admin on your site). Each audience is different… even within the same exact demographic and same niche! So, test post frequency to see if your audience engages more or less when you post more often / less often. Again, doing the hard work is the only way to get to the real answer for these questions.

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…

You already know I can be a bit OCD when it comes to tracking and numbers, so do this challenge at whatever level feels appropriate for you. You also know I am a bit miffed with Facebook right now. So, I have to tell you this because I am constantly telling myself this. Take your focus off Facebook’s changes and focus on your audience. It will do us no good to be angry with Facebook… they don’t care. They are a business and are treating us as such. We knew all along that “we” (the members) were the “product” on Facebook. So why are we surprised that they are charging us now?  We need to focus on what is working… and we need to be very organized in how we approach it.

Challenge: Methodically Test your Posts on Facebook

The goal is to take the numbers we already have and put the data to the test. We want to try different types of updates. Be methodical. Treat this like a scientific study and really track what you are doing. Try a status update at different times of the day. A post with a picture added; a post with a link added; a post with both; a post with the link in the comments… you get the picture. But keep track of when you are doing what. What gets the most engagement and then look to see what gets the most reach.  Does the reach continue to grow throughout the day on those posts?  Be sure to try different types at different times of day.

If you really want to get even more out of this study, read Best Social Media Metrics: Conversation, Amplification, Applause, Economic Value. Not only do they track their posts (on many platforms) very methodically, they also assign a dollar value to the engagement that is received. Fascinating! I’ll admit, I haven’t gone here yet… but will (eventually)! 🙂

So, are you getting anything out of these Facebook challenges? Are you feeling like they are worth your time? Please leave me comments below to let me know your thoughts about how I’m doing. Blogging can be a lonely business, you know? Of course you know, you are bloggers after all! 🙂

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….

Now that we have gotten to know our audience, our competition and what is feeding our blogs and websites… now it is time to put some of that into action!

Today’s Challenge

So here is your challenge for today and here it is at the top of the article! I recommend you turn off all the autofeeds to your Facebook page… at least for a little while. You need to really be in there with our readers and followers to see what works. So everything you post will be manual. I know this is a ten day challenge, but I highly recommend you try this for a month or so.

Why, you ask…

3 Reasons to Turn off the AutoFeeds

1. Facebook is attempting to bring relevant content to members.  There has been chatter that anything that doesn’t appear organic may not show up in your feed. With our posts being seen by fewer and fewer followers everyday, we certainly don’t need anything to prevent us from getting our posts seen. That is a big enough reason in and of itself.

2. Engagement is more timely. Getting engagement on your posts is critical to its ability to be seen. The more a person engages with your posts, pictures, etc, the more likely your posts will appear in their feed. So, go forth and engage! Seriously, chat with your followers. Have a meaningful conversation! Give them a reason to want to support you and your efforts.

3. You get to see what is working and what is not in real-time. You get to feel what time of day works best, what posts are working, what your followers want to see and hear about. I have found that at different times of day, our followers engage differently. You will figure that out too. And you will quickly realize that one size does not fit all.

I think that is one of the most important things I can tell you. There are a lot of folks out here making lots of money telling you how to do this or that… but I will say it again… one size does not fit all. Don’t waste your money on shortcuts. Do the hard work and it will pay off because you will know your audience. Well!  Brands want to work with those of us that have this kind of pulse on our market.

Let me know what your thoughts are about turning all the autofeeds off!

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 on SEO and one on Blog Titles and Topics
• Honey from Honey’s Life wrote a series on Twitter

Until next time…

How have the first two challenges gone?  Do you feel like you are really getting a handle on good Facebook content for your audience?  Now that we have spent time analyzing the numbers on Facebook, let’s get off Facebook and look at your blog’s numbers.  We need to remember what exactly the goal of social media is and decide if we are using it effectively.

The Goal of Social Media

So we have spent all this time analyzing metrics of how different posts performed on Facebook, but now we get to where the rubber meets the road. Did any of these Facebook posts lead them back to your blog? Because, ultimately, that is the goal, at least for bloggers, to drive traffic to our sites.

Is Social Media Doing its Job?

If you are a Word Press site and have the JetPack Plugin, you have the numbers to study where your traffic is coming from.  If you haven’t implemented this plugin, Navin wrote a great article for Tech Info Blog about setting it up and how to use it.

Google Analytics tracks where your traffic comes from no matter what you are using for your blog.  Ian Cleary wrote a great article on how to use Google Analytics to analyze your engagement.  Pay attention to number 5.  For my articles (which focus on Facebook), that is the number we need to focus on.  If you need to know how to set it up, here is an article on Shout Me Loud on how to set it up.

If you are like me, I am visual, BIG TIME.  I like to see charts and graphs.  Similar Web is one of my favorite tools to help me see our website. Check it out! I think this tool will analyze your site and return your traffic metrics without the other two tools being implemented. Be sure to let me know if that is not accurate!

Challenge: Determine if  Your Current SM Strategy is Working

So what have you learned from this picture that traffic paints?  Are you successfully using your social media to drive traffic to your blog?  I know it is so easy to get caught up in the “numbers game” and just look at our social media as if IT is the goal.  I get caught in that trap sometimes too. But ultimately, we don’t want our audience to be on a platform we have no control over. As we have seen with the changes Facebook is currently making, that is a risky proposition. So, we have to keep this goal in mind whenever we are analyzing our success with social media…. IS IT DRIVING TRAFFIC TO MY SITE?  If not, you now have an actionable goal to focus on how to do that!

NOTE: If you don’t already have diagnostic tools setup to determine where your traffic is coming from, get them now!  THAT is your challenge for today!!

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 on SEO and one on Blog Titles and Topics
• Honey from Honey’s Life wrote a series on Twitter

Until next time…

Did you learn a lot from studying your analytics about what types of posts your audience likes and interacts with?  Now we will take that very information we found for you on Facebook to Know your Competition! Yes, we are going there. But, let’s call it benchmarking… because really that is what we are trying to do. Determine how successful we are compared to others in our niche. We can learn a lot from others who are bigger than we are. We will look to the pages that are really growing to see if we can gather some intelligence about YOUR audience.  How do we know who they are?  Keep reading…

Graph Searches

If you haven’t started using this powerful search, you will fall in love once you try them. This is how can we study other pages that your audience likes. Simply use this search string in Facebook and replace “hip homeschool moms” with the name of your blog:

Favorite pages of people who like Hip Homeschool Moms

So what are we going to do with this information?

The Challenge: Study Your Most Successful Competitors

Now let’s spend some time understanding what is working for your largest competitors. Study the engagement, see which types of posts were the most successful.  Document the following information:

1. How often did the post?
2. When?
3. What type of posts (pictures, links, statuses, videos, contests, trivia, )?
4. What were the most successful posts?
5. How much did the page interact with their audience?
6. Notice the apps and tabs they are using would these benefit your audience?
7. Do they repost other brands content?
8. Do they use hashtags often?
9. Do they post sponsored content?

The key comparison to track is engagement rates by days, time of post, by content type and topic allows you to really start learning.

Resources to Help Analyze Your Competitors (and Yourself)

• Likealyzer.  LikeAlyzer helps you to measure and analyze the potential and effectiveness of your Facebook Page. It allows you to monitor, compare and explore all the possibilities of your Facebook Page by evaluating your activity to ensure your success on the most popular social network in the world – Facebook.
• Fan Page Karma.    is a paid tool that provides a free version that allows you to do a pretty detailed analysis of your Facebook Page and a comparison with your competitors.
• Conversation Score.  CScore is a free tool that performs an analysis of your Facebook Page, categorizes and gives it a score based on the behavior of your Page.
• AgoraPulse Barometer. This report provides an analysis of your Facebook Page and compares it against other companies’ Pages (that also used this tool) that have a similar number of fans. It calculates the average percentage on several criteria based on your last 50 posts. The report shows the score for your Page received compared with the average score for other Pages that ran this assessment.

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 🙂

I know these challenges are harder than most, but because Facebook is changing, we have to really understand our niche to be effective.  I encourage you to take your time…. if it can’t be done overnight, come back after you have completed that day’s challenge before you start the next one.  These challenges will build on each other!

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…

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…