Anyone that knows the team here at SBPR will know that we live and breathe all things social media. We love it so much that we even host our own social media courses to pass on all we know to businesses who are doing it for themselves.
To make sure that our social media courses are the best they can be, the SBPR team are always researching the latest algorithm changes and here’s the latest from the giant of the social channels, Facebook.
Audience
With PR and social media, the first thing you need to do is to think about who you are talking to, who are your audience? Age, demographic, gender, location, interests etc, and from that you can get a better idea of what media they consume. And with so many social media channels to choose from nowadays, it’s good to sit back, think about your audience and where they spend their time when they’re socialising online. Facebook’s audience are predominantly 25-34 year olds with a 50/50 mix of males and females, so if that sounds like your kind of audience then carry on reading!
SEO
In a similar way to filling out Google My Business, filling out your company page on Facebook makes your SEO very happy so make that your first port of call. Everything from opening hours, location, phone number, website etc – the more information the better.
Posts
A common objective we hear when it comes to social media is to get new followers, but why concentrate on the people you don’t even know yet, it makes much more sense to prioritise your existing fans. It keeps them happy and engaged and they will organically entice new members by sharing and telling their friends how great you are.
The average organic reach of posts on Facebook is between 1-6%, usually around 3%, so make sure you check out your analytics and see how your posts are doing and try to improve on that, we suggest aiming to improve your post reach by 25% each week.
So, how to keep your existing fans happy and improve your post reach? Here’s an easy checklist:
Mix it up – try not to post all videos, or all images, try an even mix of videos, links, images, memes etc and then rotate.
Give it up - don’t bother boosting content that’s not doing well, if it’s not doing well by itself then FB doesn’t like it. It works much better if you boost content that FB does like and that is already doing well. And if you are boosting, don’t rely on FB’s automatic audience choice, go in and check that marries up with what you think.
Keep it simple – did you know that the scrolling speed of your thumb down your FB newsfeed is the equivalent to driving past a billboard at 60mph?! Think about that the next time you create an image with loads of text – you have approximately an nth of a nanosecond to get people’s attention and get your message across.
Emoji it up – whether you’re emoji obsessed and only communicate in pictures now, or if you have no idea what they mean – you need to use at least one in each of your FB posts as they increase the reach of your posts by 33%. If you really can’t stand them, you can just use an arrow emoji to point down to the post – and try and avoid the 🍆!
Keep it real – your content should always be authentic, it doesn’t have to be original, there are bound to be lots of people talking around the same subjects you are, you just need to make sure that your ‘voice’ is real and therefore authentic and relatable.
Engaging
We always say that engaging with your audience on Facebook is the most important action. In fact, we say that out of all the time you spend on your social media channels you should spend just 20% of your time broadcasting or posting, and 80% of that time engaging and talking to your fans.
The average engagement rate of posts on Facebook is a very low and sad 1%. To boost that and get more people talking to you try commenting on your own posts and others’. Comments are the best type of engagement, followed by shares. The Facebook algorithm will reward you for these types of engagements so comment away!
Facebook doesn’t like rubbish posts and will punish you for doing too many posts which get low engagement, so it’s way better to do a few really engaging posts than lots of average ones. And try your best to avoid saying things like ‘comment below’ as Facebook sees this as spam, ask questions to gain engagement, even better ask these questions in the comments.
Videos
We all know videos outperform image and text only posts and just for fun every month or so Facebook changes its mind about how it wants its videos to keep us all on our toes. At the moment it is not prioritising any videos under 60 seconds, videos should be over three minutes if possible. It is also imperative that videos come with subtitles for the mute scroller and should always have a call to action at the top of the video with snappy captions.
We know Facebook can seem a bit overwhelming, but we also know that if you work with Facebook and keep it happy then it can do wonders for your business which is why we think it’s really important to share the knowledge we have. If you’d like to find out more about Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Linked In, you can book onto our next online course on Thursday 18th February. It’s on Zoom from 10am – 2pm and is designed to give you all the tools, tips, and tricks to not only do your own social media and do it well, but also how to beat the algorithms and save time.
You can find out more about our Reaching Millions Social Media course and book your space here.
If you try out these tips we’d love to hear from you and find out how you got on, email the team and let us know – hello@sunnybirdpr.com