Chelsea Hejny is a social media writer at ShortStack, a tab-designing tool that creates custom Facebook Pages. Hejny also works as a president of the American Marketing Association in Nevada.
Creating and managing a Facebook Page for your business or organization is only half the battle. For a Page to have real value, its content needs to be seen and shared. The best place for this is in Facebook’s News Feed. Getting your Page’s content to appear in your users’ News Feeds can prove to be challenging. Facebook uses two sophisticated algorithms called Edgerank and Graph Rank to determine what content is shown in the News Feed. To bypass the complexity, here are six tips to improve your Facebook Page’s News Feed presence.
- Content is not always king. The logical thing to assume is that the more content you produce and share on your Page, the better opportunity there is for your posts to be seen in the News Feed. But this tactic can quickly backfire on a Page’s Like count. Posting too often is one of the top reasons for a Fan to unlike a Page. The idea is to post quality content that receives high user feedback, as opposed to having a lot of posts with low user feedback, as this could in turn hurt your Page’s chances of getting into the News Feed. As a simple rule of thumb, limit your Page’s daily content to two to three posts that you think will receive high rates of engagement.
- Vary your posts. Often it’s not what you are saying, but what you are sharing that makes a post worthy of a comment, share or Like. Facebook posts that include photos, videos and polls receive the best engagement rates. By accompanying text posts with interesting, trending or funny media content or poll questions, you’re optimizing user engagement, as well as claiming a space in your users’ News Feeds.
- Timing is everything. There have been several studies done that provide great recommendations as to what day and what time content is most viewed by Facebook users. These recommendations should be interpreted loosely. Facebook log-on and engagement tendencies vary across Facebook user groups. To determine the optimal posting time for your targeted Facebook audience, you’ll need to experiment a little. Break from your regular posting schedule and see what results come of the change. Once you think you’ve discovered your optimal posting time, take advantage of Facebook’s real-time content stream, Ticker, to post content during that time.
- Post about a trending topic. In August, Facebook introduced Aggregated Topics. Through Natural Language Processing, Facebook is able to cluster words in status updates to brand Pages. This means, during the holiday time, for example, if you post something about Christmas, that status update is more likely to show up at the top of the News Feed along with other posts mentioning Christmas. Use this tip to include trending words relating to upcoming events or holidays in your status updates to land your content at the top of the News Feed.
- Go manual. Using third-party applications to schedule and post content to your Facebook wall may seem convenient, but there’s a downside. When deciding what content gets in the News Feed, Facebook shows preference to manual posts made while logged into Facebook. It might not be a great enough reason to ditch your third-party app, but it’s something to take note of.
- Use Facebook’s new features. Although the task of keeping up with Facebook’s changes seems a bit bothersome, it’s a beneficial thing to do. When Facebook introduces a new feature or service, user engagements with the new product are highlighted in the News Feed over other Facebook interactions. So instead of waiting to gauge whether a new feature will be popular or not, it’s smart to use the feature shortly after its launch to get easy News Feed attention.
Landing your Page’s content in the News Feed is a daunting task for Page Admins and marketers alike. However, using the above tips will dramatically increase your chances of getting your Page’s content noticed.
What tips have you learned for increasing your Page’s content visibility in the News Feed?