For the longest time, I just sort of gave Facebook a miss. Of course, I posted stuff on there, but it was via my personal account. Yet even with near-total neglect, my Facebook Page is starting to pants my Google+ efforts, as I wrote about yesterday. So I’m changing things up a bit to give Facebook a bit more of a push. Here’s the current plan.
First, I checked to see when I was already receiving the most visitors from Facebook to my blog. I created a custom Google Analytics report that broke out times of day for me and got a reasonably good estimate. For those of you who are premium subscribers to my newsletter, you’ll get a copy of this report that you can install into your own Google Analytics accounts in this week’s newsletter.
Turns out that the morning is generally when folks stop by from Facebook, so I’ll be using Buffer to queue up content for that period of time. Since Facebook is a long-form content network, I’ll also be using the Google+ versions of #the5 on there to see if that spurs additional discussion and commentary.
I’ll be sharing more stuff as I figure out for myself what’s most effective and what’s not. For now, I’m looking at what content on my site is most popular with the Facebook crowd, and a lot of it is the how-to stuff. (Google Analytics will tell you this, just create a custom traffic segment for Facebook) That’ll be another testing point to see if that’s true or not.
Because my Facebook Page is more or less a personality page, as opposed to a corporation or a product, I don’t plan on running any contests, coupons, PPC ads, or promotions just yet, though I’d certainly love to hear if you are doing that for a personality-based page with any level of success.
What’s working for you on your Facebook Page that I should add to my list of things to test out? What hasn’t worked? Leave your thoughts in the comments!
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i’ve been wholly against facebook pages for individuals (personalities, solo musicians etc) for quite some time. as a singer/songwriter, i just didn’t see it offering anything i didn’t already have on my personal page.
i set up one more or less just to use as a landing page to encourage folks to subscribe to my personal page. but now, with the implementation of timeline…i feel like they’re forcing my hand.
This is most interesting, thank you. I’ve been running a real ghost-town of a B2B Facebook page for some time now, which has attracted almost zero interest. My gut feeling was that Facebook was not a ‘work’ thing for many people.
When Google+ came along it *seemed* to me to feel better. But I’m not getting much of a response from there either. Twitter’s working best for me. By miles.
In the light of what you describe here I may need to have another serious attempt at Facebook, and I’ll certainly be very keen to hear more about how you’re getting on. Thanks for sharing the data.
Chris, my suggestion is to keep “engagement” in mind as you select content for Facebook. Which of your content is most likely to generate clicks, likes, comments, shares, etc. I’m interested in following your progress with this. Thanks for sharing it!