My Behind-the-Scenes January Check-in
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.
Where am I now?
After I put this out there, I realized that I was accountable.
How easy it would have been to fall into the same patterns as last year – just set the page up and post up a few things that I think you’d like to read. No effort on my part would just send me back to the same low organic reach place and getting lost in my fans Facebook home feed.
Nope. Not this time my friend. This Facebook fan page would be different.
I promised my readers I would give them a year long experiment about how to grow your Facebook’s fan page and that’s what I going to do. I said I was going to share what I learned about what worked and what didn’t. And how this can help you grow your fan page.
So here we go …. my first recap of what I learned in January:
The first thing I noticed, there are LOTS of changes to Facebook since I started my first fan page!
1. Customizing my fan page
For some reason Facebook thought my personal profile of Penney Fox was a fan page and wouldn’t let me have my name as my fan page. So to keep it as close to my name as I could, I secured the custom URL of this: https://www.facebook.com/ThePenneyFox
Going through that process just gave me a laugh – that I ended up using the word THE in front of my name. Like there are other people out there with the same name as me and I just wanted to make sure that you were at the right page 🙂
2. My first fan goal
I learned that I needed at least 30 fans before Facebook would let me see my Insights. So the number 30 became my first fan goal number.
The first place I started was to reach out to my Facebook friends. I didn’t hit the Select All button but carefully selected those people who I knew were either small business owners or would have an interest in learning more about social media.
The last thing I wanted to be was all spammy like “Hey Faceook friend that I never talk to, Like my page.” That’s not a good strategy to have fans who want to see what you’re posting and want to engage with what you have to say.
As I sorted through my friend list, I didn’t realize how many people I knew that were small business owners or were into social media. I hit my first goal by the first week of January (the page went up mid-December).
Just something to think about as you’re trying to grow your social presence – one of the best places to start is with your friends and the people you’re already connected to that you either do business with or you’ve met in a networking opportunity like a Facebook group or a local meeting.
3. My next fan goal number was 50
After a bit more research, I learned that I needed to get to 50 fans before Facebook would allow me to run a boost post or hit that button to pay to promote my page.
Part of my year-long experiment will be to run some paid ads in Facebook and track my results. The next big number I pushed towards was the big 5-0.
I sent the LIKE request thing to all the friends who I thought would make sense to be fans so it was time to hit my next line of connections. I posted my new fan page in my email newsletter Social Media Conversations and then posted my link in several of the Facebook groups I belong.
I made sure I let the groups’ members know that I just started a new page. Seriously, how would that look to be this social media strategist person and have only 40 something fans?
4. My posts
When I did my research, it appears that the average number of posts are between 4 – 7 per day. That sounds more like a strategy plan for Twitter than for your Facebook fan page.
If you do the math, that’s anywhere between 20 – 35 posts a week on Facebook. And that’s an awful lot of content to come up with every single week! I can see why most small business owners get discouraged about how to keep up with their Facebook postings.
The first thing I did was work on a content calendar that was specific for my fan page. I started to test out content links, days of the week and times of the day to see where I was getting the most reach with my fans.
I know from working with my clients and creating a content strategy for other social sites, it’ll take about 3 months before I can see any patterns emerge about what’s connecting and what’s not.
So at this point, I’m testing random times and days with different content posts. I’ve started tracking my results and will have more to report by the end of March.
By the end of January, I did discover a few things: My fans hit the Like button when I post up inspirational quotes, quirky pins I’ve found and they love my golden retriever. The top post for the entire month of January was this one of my dog Winston.
This post falls under my category that I call Entertainment, with a sub-category of “Seriously, folks, how cute is this face?”
What did I learn in January?
- Setting up a fan page is still very easy and quick.
- You need to hit 30 fans before you can start checking your fan page’s Insights.
- My fans like quotes and pins that show off my sense of humor.
- Winston will make a monthly appearance on my fan page 🙂
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.