“It really can’t be that hard to post something on Facebook for all your fans to see it around the world, right?” A quote used by so many but unfortunately so far from the truth. Something that seems to be so simple can be much more complicated.
If you sit down and think about it, you may wonder how many of your friends and fans actually see your Facebook posts, because surely if they did your posts would receive more likes and shares. The reason why all your followers may not see your posts is due to Facebook being controlled by Edgerank, which means just publishing a post is far from good enough. A whole 1million updates are shared every one minute! That’s right, every 60 seconds Facebook receives up to 1million updates so they have to filter the content somehow. As marketers and business owners you really need to know how this algorithm works and how to exploit it, so you have the best chance of people seeing your content. Here are 3 top tips to help you beat Edgerank.
Timing is Vital!
There are key times of the day to post and getting this right is vital. Being able to see what days and times of the week your fans are online is an excellent way of being able to know when the best time to post is. Luckily Facebook has a great tool that allows you to do this. Go to your Page insights, then look under the Posts tab and all the information you need is there, broken down into days and a weekly average, then simply post at the peak times when most of your fans are online.
Post! Post! Post!
It is very important that you don’t forget to post regularly otherwise Facebook will punish you for this. As Facebook loves it when you post lots and be social, therefore when you post infrequently the lower reach will become, which means it will appear less and less on fans pages. Depending on how many fans you have will decide on how you handle this situation. If you only have a few hundred fans posting just every few days is fine however when your fans start to increase you must post more but keep it natural! 1-2 posts a day 5-7 days a week is seen as a good amount of times to post for a page with thousands of fans. Focus on good quality and exciting content so you get more interaction, keep your fans interested.
No Over Posting.
No one wants the same sort of posts to be flooding their newsfeed, it gets boring! If this was to happen your fans may get annoyed, which may cause them to stop interacting with your posts, unfollow you or worse, unlike your page. In addition, Facebook may limit the amount of posts that are seen by fans. Facebook loves likeable, quality content that gets a lot of interaction therefore if you share or post something every 5 minutes there is a high chance a lot of those posts are going to be rubbish! A recommended amount of times to post is a maximum of twice a day spacing them out as much as possible, maybe one in the morning and one late afternoon or in the evening. This will give your posts a chance and time to grow, be seen and interacted with before the next one goes live.
When these tips are fully understood and used Facebook is an excellent tool for connecting you and your customers together and to build loyal communities. Although this may take time to get just right it is so worth it in the end and will bring so many benefits!