Facebook

You’ve probably come across Facebook pages with thousands of likes and an active community and wondered why yours only gets a couple of likes a week and hardly any engagement.

It’s all to do with the amount of time, money and effort you’re prepared to invest.

Facebook filters who sees your posts so, just because you have 100 likes, doesn’t mean that 100 people are shown your posts.  It’s much, much lower – more like 15 people.  Then you have to take into account whether those people are all looking at their Facebook feed when your posts are presented.  If they only log in every other day they may never see your post.

Money

You can pay to sponsor or promote a post and then more people see it.

You can pay to run a ‘Likes’ campaign and be very specific about who you want to see it – by gender, age, interests, geographic location and more.

These cost money and you need to get your message right.  You might want to engage someone who does this as a service and has excellent results.  They know what works and what doesn’t and how to create a post or an ad that really gets a good response.

Time

Your Page needs you to manage it – so be prepared to put in some time.  When you’re trying to grow the page you should be present daily with something that your audience will find interesting and/or useful.

Bear in mind that people pay more attention to posts with images – so you need to have access to suitable images (or be good with your camera/smartphone) that you have the right to use.

People are even more inclined to engage with video content so you may need to invest time in creating short videos both for your ads and for your page.

Effort

Videos don’t have to be professionally produced – but they do need to be easy for people to follow – so no rambling incoherently!  It’s worth doing some planning and creating a script or at least some bullet points to follow.  Ensure you have an uncluttered background (if you have a pop up display stand with your brand, but without too much text on it – that might be a good background).

You’re trying to build a community – and it won’t happen without your input.  This means that you will need to plan the content you want to post, find images that work for your business and decide on a tone or style for your posts.

What can you offer people that will make them want to come back?

Posting a few random comments or the occasional tip or product image won’t be enough to get engagement.

It doesn’t have to be a long post (although the occasional one is fine), but you do need to post consistently.

Don’t post anything unrelated to your business – no matter how cute; that’s for your personal page.

The plus side is that a plan will make it much easier as you’ll know what you’re writing about each day rather than being faced with a blank comment box.