My Year Long Facebook Experiment

My Facebook Confession

For those of you who missed my January Facebook Experiment recap, let me repeat for you how this whole social experiment thing got started:

I made a full-on confession about my Facebook fan page in my 2014 Social Media Story recap.

In this post, I owned up to my struggles by sharing this behind the scenes look at a social media strategist’s Facebook fan page:

Facebook was a big flat tire for me in 2014. I had a few moments where I rode the Facebook roller coaster but mostly it was like a flat tire – slowly losing air and making that squeaky sound mocking me.

By the time Facebook made its changes to our organic reach, I realized that it was becoming useless for me to try to stop it from deflating. It didn’t matter that I was adding images to my marketing messages or I was doing what they call “Link Share” posts. Nothing seemed to work to increase my engagement or reach.

When I posted my little rant about To Facebook or Not to Facebook, I was halfway out the Facebook door. I was close to just dumping the whole fan page thing. If someone as big as Copyblogger can kill their page, why not me?

I could close that page down and no one would notice. I mean, none of my fans were seeing my posts or commenting or sharing my stuff, so why bother with creating content or spending any time engaging?

But then I did my end of the year assessment of my social sites. I checked my fan page’s insights and realized something – the people who had LIKED my page were the ones who signed on BEFORE I found my focus. They were there from the old consulting work I was doing and most likely had no interest in my new direction.

I was not reaching my target audience. I was spending all this time promoting to the wrong people. Well, no wonder this wasn’t working. {Actually I think the word DUH came out of my mouth.}

So I made the decision to shut down my old fan page and start over. And the minute I signed on to my new fan page, I got excited again. I started posting to people to who got me and wanted to see my posts.

What Worked and What Didn’t

January was about the set up of my new fan page and getting my first followers – click here to read more about January’s experiment.

February taught me about how to create a Facebook Boost Post and reach more Facebookers who weren’t already following my page. To read the details of my Facebook Boost Post experiment, click here to see February’s results.

By the time I hit March, my Facebook experiment was all about learning what worked and what didn’t.

By the end of my first three months of my new fan page, I still didn’t have a Facebook strategy in place. I was posting at random times in different days to test out when I could reach my fans. I tested different messages with a wide range of content – quotes, social media resource articles, time management tips and some promotions for my own online products.

March gave me three months of content that I could review. Three months of posts, links and images. It was time to start looking for patterns.

Getting insight into my Facebook Insights

To view this information, log into your fan page and then click on the Insights button across the top section of your page.

When you scroll down the page, you’ll see something that says, Your Most Recent Posts. Click on the ‘see more’ button to get more details about your other posts.

I wish there was a way to request a date range but unfortunately, there’s not. For me to see what happened during the first three months of this year, I had to keep clicking the ‘see more’ button until I saw the posts come up from January.

I pulled up a word document and started taking notes. I listed out my top posts for each month based on the reach number and engagement { likes and clicks }. I added in extra details like what day the post went up and what time of day I originally posted it.

And just like I suspected, I could see the pattern emerge of when my fans saw my posts in their news feeds.

My top days were Wednesday, Thursday and Friday – which didn’t surprise me. The articles I’ve been reading in my research have said that the end of the week is a better time  to post on Facebook to reach more people.

My best time of day to connect with my fans is between 12pm – 1pm and then later at night from 7pm – 9pm.

Again, no surprise here.

It’s lunchtime in the eastern coast of the US and the later time is when the kids are doing their homework, getting ready for bed, watching TV or whatever your kids are doing at that time at night. It seems that’s a good two-hour block when my fans have settled in with Facebook for the night.

I was also posting around 9am – 9:30am and sometime between 4:30pm – 5pm. I had a few top posts with those times but not as much as the lunchtime and evening posts.

What did I learn?

To make sure that my post reaches the greatest number of my fans, I need to schedule that message either from 12pm – 1pm or between 7pm – 9pm on either Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

This information is a HUGE piece of the Facebook fan page puzzle. It’ll make my scheduling process go quicker as I know which days and times to focus on with my top content for every week.

It’s Facebook Strategy Time

Three months of Facebook Insight information was enough to give me some direction to start work on my Facebook strategy.

I looked at the content at my top posts and I could see that my fans were interested in the following stuff: resources to create images, visual content tips, how to use Facebook for their business, time management and encouraging quotes.

That narrows down my content focus quite a bit.

But it’s only been three months. What if there’s more stuff they’re interested in?

It was time for a good old fashioned brainstorm session. I pulled out another word document and started typing out ideas.

I thought about how I feel as a fan of a page I go to all the time. What kind of information would I like to see more of? What would connect me more to this company?

Then I sorted through my list and created my first Facebook strategy plan for my new fan page.

And I can’t tell you how much better it feels to have a direction to move in to keep growing my fan page! The strategy gives me a path to follow so I’m not just going back to that old habit of just throwing up posts to have something – anything! – to show people that I’m still active in Facebook.

The strategy includes posting my top content to see if that continues to do well with my fans as well as adding in new ideas. The goal is to connect with your fans so that they’ll click your links, like what they see and hopefully comment and share your posts.

To give you a peek at one of my new features, take a look at this weekly time management tip:

 

Kicked up my followers with a Page Promotion

You know how Facebook pops up that link asking if you want to promote your page to get more fans? Well, I see it all the time too and in a totally not planned out moment, I clicked the button.

I ran a small campaign to boost the Likes in my fan page. And it worked!

In 2 weeks, I spent a little over $20 and gained 35 new fans to my page. And the coolest thing about these new fans, is that I targeted the campaign to connect with Facebookers who would be interested in following my posts.

I used the People information in my Insights to see who to target. Over 90% of my current fans were women between the age of 35 – 55. They lived in the US, mostly down the east coast.

Knowing this information made my targeting easier than when I worked through my Facebook Boost Posts in February. The whole thing was so easy.

I uploaded an image from one of the Facebook covers I created. I set up my target audience to women 40 – 55, listed six of the tops states from my Insights and set the interests to: Small business, Blog, Marketing, Education, Small Business Saturday, Business or Social media.

Hit the button and within the first day, I got the first of my new targeted fan.

Take a look at the final recap from my campaign:

Seriously, not bad for $20. I reached 691 women and 35 liked what they saw and hit the Like button. I’ll do some more research on how to improve those numbers but for now, I’m happy to see my new Facebook page reach over 200 fans.

I realize that 200 is not this big huge number but I truly believe that for this Facebook stuff to work, that’s not about the numbers. It’s about connecting with the right people.

Think about this – would you rather have 2000 fans and have only 50 people who are really engaged and interested in your stuff? OR 200 fans and all 200 of them want to learn more from you, click on your links, share your posts and buy your products?

Yeah, I’ll take the 200 fans too.

The Comments are Open

Do you have any suggestions about something you’ve tried that helped to increase your Facebook fan page reach or something that grew your fans? Let me know. I’m open to trying out any and all suggestions!

Hopefully, you’ll join me over at my new Facebook Page! I’d love to connect with you over there and we can work on this together to see if this Facebook stuff really can work for small business owners.