Navigating Facebook as a brand can reveal an unexpectedly hazardous course. Rather than just signing up, uploading your company logo, posting regularly, and waiting for the followers to arrive in droves, you’re probably finding that it’s difficult to establish a respectable social presence.
Never fear, though. What you’re experiencing is nothing more than a par-for-the-course hurdle that we all have to confront at some point: how to realistically build a social following that is going to make a significant difference to your business.
1. Quality Comes First
Always bear in mind that quality content is a much more impressive trait than posting consistency (although we’d advise you never to become too relaxed about posting frequency). If you’re sharing content that you genuinely believe is strong and worthwhile on its own, there’s a good chance that it will resonate with readers.
On the other hand, if you’re obviously producing content just to maintain your presence and keep up your post rate, expect nothing amazing to happen. Create content worth reading, worth sharing, and you might find more people find it worth clicking the ‘follow’ button.
2. Sharing is Caring
Following on from the above point, it only stands to reason that organic marketing (ie. word of mouth) is born when someone discovers content that they genuinely feel a connection with.
A massive component of any social networking site (especially Facebook) is the fact that they encourage sharing content. In terms of business, this can also mean free marketing for your company.
However, one needs to be cautious about how they approach social media, as anything that sounds contrived or phony is generally going to be ignored by the masses.
The key to success here is creating unique, quality, bite-sized content which people can consume quickly and easily. Create something worth sharing, and the rest will take care of itself.
3. Stay Organic - Do NOT Buy Followers!
We know it can be tempting to purchase some likes or followers using Fiverr and other microjob websites. The fact of the matter, though, is that all you’re going to be doing here is increasing your number of followers. Your content will still be falling on deaf ears, as purchased traffic usually involves fake accounts.
Likewise, you can expect the vast majority of your purchased followers to disappear when Facebook (or any other social networking sites) perform routine purges of spam accounts.
Trust us, you’ll gain a much greater feeling of satisfaction if your followers build organically. One share from a genuine person is worth much more than 1,000 likes from non-exist ant people!
4. Link to Your Facebook Profile as Much as Possible
If you already have a successful website (or YouTube channel, or Twitter Account or LinkedIn page) that’s accumulated a core audience, make sure to link to your Facebook profile at the end of every post or update. We’d recommend against adding an obnoxiously large Facebook logo that people can’t ignore, but rather adding a smaller link with a message along the lines of “If you liked this post, please consider liking us on Facebook.”
People who stumble across your content won’t appreciate being virtually shouted at to subscribe to your feeds. On the other hand, if you’re humble and genuine, you may charm them into checking out your Facebook page.
5. Interact!
Always (and we mean always) try to maintain a connection with your followers, especially if they’ve contacted you. You should always respond to their comments, queries, and suggestions as quickly as possible, and make sure to maintain a professional attitude and image when doing so. When someone feels like there’s a real person behind your social media messaging, they’re more likely to trust you. And the more they trust you, the more likely they are to become customers and recommend you to others.
This is in stark contrast to faceless companies who don’t project a friendly and enthusiastic image. If someone won’t respond to you on Facebook, you’re hardly going to want to then send them money or support their endeavors.
6. Use Infographics & Other Shareable Images
Following on from our previous mention about creating bite-sized, shareable content, you should always try to look out for opportunities to convey your message using graphics – just think about how much more often your speed-scrolling slows down when you see a cool image compared to a block of text. Infographics are a fantastic way to convey statistics and interesting tidbits of information about your business and industry.
Using plain text to deliver the same information can often result in mind-numbingly boring content that doesn’t even get a glance. Stripping your message of superfluous wording and sharing just the fundamental facts in a pretty picture can create a much more successful campaign to establish a connection with your followers.
7. Be Patient The last point we’ll make, but by no means less important than any of the above, is that you should remain patient, humble, and continue persevering. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will your devoted audience be. However, if you maintain a sense of professionalism and quality in your posts and keep moving forward, you will reach your destination. Once you have hit a large enough number, you’ll find that your number of followers will start to rise at a much faster rate than ever before with the same amount of effort.
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