Engaging with Your Clients on Facebook

Facebook boasts over one billion users, a veritable treasure trove for marketers.  And yet for small business pages, it is increasingly difficult to interact with their own fans (let alone new ones). Who’s to blame?  Many users are pointing their fingers at Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm, which determines which posts appear on their fans’ news feeds. EdgeRank takes many variables into account in assigning your page its ranking; they include engagement, number of comments, who re-posted the story, and the kind of post it is, as well as how old the post is. So just how can a business page connect with its hard-earned followers within EdgeRank’s parameters?

Facebook EdgeRank Survival Guide

Whatever your opinion of Facebook’s EdgeRank is, the fact of the matter is that we can’t change it (how does that death and taxes saying go?). But don’t worry; we have your EdgeRank survival guide covered: Start with eye-catching content. How do you engage your fans? Great engagement depends on sharing great, eye-catching, and relevant content.  Videos and photos are key. Get creative (but not too creative, if you know what we’re saying). Here are some ideas:

• Photographs of your employees and business volunteering in the community,
• Photo albums with eye-catching titles
• “Behind the scenes” photos and videos of the company
• Problem-solving instructional videos about your product.

Know what people like to interact with. According to PostRocket, Photographs, albums, and videos carry the most weight with EdgeRank. Sharing links to relevant articles, preferably with photos, comes second, with plain text status updates ranking the worst in the page ranking game. Keep them interested. For the love of social media, your Facebook status updates don’t always have to sell your product. People love to talk about themselves! Here are a few secrets to achieving just that:

• Ask your fans questions with the poll question feature
• Use fill in the blank questions
• Ask them if they prefer “this or that” using a photo

Do it every day!  One of the elements in determining EdgeRank includes the age of the post; the older a post is, the less likely it is to stay on your clients’ timelines. Your goal should be to update your content at least one to two times daily. Again: the older a story is, the less value it has, and the less likely it is to turn up on your fans’ feeds. Tell them how to see more of your posts. You can also teach your fans how to see all your page’s updates by sharing the following with them: 1.      Go to the Timeline or Page; 2.      Click “Liked,” and 3.      Click “Show in My Feed.” Advertise with Facebook. It’s almost a given that Facebook will continue changing its EdgeRank algorithm. Whether we agree with it or not, while we use the free service it is a business’s responsibility to keep its followers educated on how subscribe to its own posts. Following the above tips helps, but don’t rule out using Facebook ads, which can be targeted to very specific audiences. Want more details? Check out Facebook’s guideline to how posts appear in your users’ timelines. Sources: AdRants.com,  “What Marketers Need to Know About Facebook EdgeRank,” Steve Hall, 23 April 2013. Facebook.com, “How News Feed Works.” Image: Owen W. Brown