Facebook Best Practices For Brands

In this podcast, I will be covering suggestions for Facebook posts as well as a brief overview and explanation of the Facebook algorithm. I believe that this information is valuable to every business that currently uses social media or is considering entering their brand into the social media space. I will be sharing a solid overall strategy that is designed to strengthen your own digital platforms and grow your social media audience.

Hello my name is Carlos Quintero, owner and founder of the MediaOnQ Podcast, where I help you sort through all of the digital media clutter so that you can compete in today’s web economy. 

I have a wide range of clients ranging from individual personalities in media all the way up to large entertainment media companies all over the United States. Recently one of my clients in the healthcare industry shared that she planned on canceling most of her traditional marketing since she could simply post on Facebook and get her message out to the community.

It is amazing really how while there is some truth to her way of thinking there simply is a lot missing.

I then had to respond with, you know that at best you will only ever reach 16% of your fans right? That literally means that out of every 100 followers, at best only 16 of them will see your Facebook post. 

I need to point out that Facebook will allow you to reach more than 16% but you will have to pay for it by running ads through their network.

It is kind of hard to swallow isn’t it? We all know how much effort and work it takes to keep up with social media on top of our daily workload.

After reviewing a little bit over 50 Facebook brand pages, I came up with my 5 Facebook Post Suggestions to help improve your marketing’s reach on Facebook.

My 5 Facebook Post Suggestions

Based on my experience, I would suggest that every Facebook post should do one or more of the following:

Focus on Impact

Move Fast

Be Bold

Transparency

Build Social Value

Let’s break these down a bit.

• • Focus on impact
• o Does it Matter? Why does it matter? Is it relevant?
• o Now remember we are talking about the brand’s visibility on Facebook to apply these questions to your brand and your brand’s target audience.
• • Move Fast 
• o My advice here is simple. If you are posting the same thing everyone else is posting, what or why should the masses flock to you for the information that is readily available basically everywhere on the web. The answer is simple there is no need.
• o I have a news media client who produces local news stories as well as covers larger regional and national news events. We’ve all seen various digital news sources, they basically all share the same information right? Well the social media value that this client brings is the ability to bring attention to well covered subjects through a different perspective, exclusive audio interviews, video or photos.
• o In a nutshell what I am suggesting is that you add your own personal perspective to well covered topics so that your end product results in Original Content.
• • Be Bold 
• o What I mean by be bold is to simply allow your brand’s personality to show
• o It is ok to be flawed – none of us are perfect
• o Allow and encourage involvement
• • Transparency 
• o Show off your brands passion
• o Encourage your audience to share in your passions
• o Be Open
• o Ask your audience for feedback AND remember to acknowledge their feedback
• • Build Social Value 
• o Bring value to your fans, in other words don’t turn your Facebook page into a self promoting platform but rather showcase how your brand impacts your customer’s lives.
• o We’ve all been to the furniture store where instantly a sales person comes up and asks if they can help us find anything in particular...to me that approach is irritating. And while I know that the sales person is simply trying to earn their sales commission, it is really a quick way for me to want to get out of their store.
• o It works the same in social media. You have to provide value to your visitors and be respectful of their time and effort to visit your brand’s page. 
• o Once you get them to visit your page, you don’t want them to get that feeling of how quick can I get out of here to get away from the pushy sales person…You want to give them a reason to interact with your brand and hopefully want to learn more about your brand – ending up on your own website where you’ll have full control over their experience with your brand.

KEY Factors That Influence the Facebook Algorithm 

In case you don’t know. Your brands Facebook post will never reach 100% of your fans or followers. The Facebook algorithm controls how much of your content is actually visible to your fans. And if you are doing everything right at best you will only reach 16% of your fans at any one time.

Now let’s go over what that actually means and break it down a bit.

The Facebook algorithm has 3 rules in place that seek DIRECT and AUTHENTIC dialogue.

• • Rule #1 Affinity
• o Affinity looks for authentic type of posts and active interaction.
• ♣ What that means adding your own perspective to well covered topics and how your fans interact with your post
• ♣ If your fans don’t have a genuine interaction with your content, your messages will not reach them in the future. In other words, the fans who interact with you on a regular basis are the ones who get to see your messages, if they don't interact with you - your messages never makes it on to their news feed. 
• ♣ Remember; Brands can only reach 16% of their fans without paying for additional reach. 

• • Rule #2 Weight
• o While I don't want to discourage likes, likes carry very little weight. Sending a message, commenting on a post, tagging an individual, mentions on their own pages, writing on your wall...are all examples of direct and authentic dialogue that carry substantial weight. The more weight the brand carries, the higher the likelihood that that the brand will reach all 16% of the allowed reach.

• • Rule #3 Timing
• o This rule is basically looking for continuous interaction over time. 
• o The main key for your brand here is not to post everything at once – Facebook attempts to view posts as a conversation…a two-sided conversation.

And those are the 3 rules that govern the Facebook algorithm.

Here’s a great rule of thumb when it comes to Facebook posts. As you’re thinking about what you are about to post ask yourself this question. Is this post positioned to produce continuous interplay? If the answer is yes, then it should be a good post. 

Always remember to push the traffic back to your own website – where you can control the brand experience for your website visitors. Think of your Facebook post as a way to "tease" your content. The objective should be to drive traffic back to your own website, blog or podcast.

We’ve all seen at least one post that makes us question; what on earth were they thinking. You know what I’m talking about; for example, I have a headache or I'm eating spaghetti O’s our of a can type of status update. These types of posts should never make it onto your brand pages.

It is important that you don’t isolate your digital media branding strategy. When it comes to your brand, you need to consider every aspect TV, Radio, Print, Outdoor, Web, Mobile, Social and even TXT platforms as a unified strategy. That strategy should create a compelling and captivating brand interaction specific to the delivery platform.

Facebook brand pages should be the voice of your company’s brand - I understand that this is a whole new way of thinking about and looking at social media. 

Follow my 5 Facebook Post Suggestions and you should gain more followers while you increase your brand’s top of mind awareness and build competitive barriers.

There are many companies out there that tackle social media without a plan. That will not be you.

If you’d like to provide feedback or would like additional information please visit mediaonq.com and contact me. I make it a point to answer all of my messages personally.

In the show notes, I will include several Facebook brand pages where these brands use the timeline to tell the brand story in a simplified and effective way. You can find them at mediaonq.com.

Join me next week where we will explore how to use Pintrest for business. Roberta will be joining as a special guest host; helping us drilling down on who should consider using it to increase their brand’s awareness and pinpointing specific marketing strategies to increase Pintrest followers and web traffic to your own sites.

I am Carlos Quintero and I run a digital media branding company in the Midwest, so if you’d like advice on your own Facebook brand page strategy please contact me, I’m here to help. 

Thank you for listening to MediaOnQ.