Social Media is here to stay. Consumers rely on social media to interact with businesses, gain insight on new services and products and help make a final determination in their buying process. If you have not already set up a Facebook Business or Fan Page for your brand, you are going to want to do so immediately after reading this blog post.
Social Media Optimization Recommendations
It is recommended you follow this blog post as the social media Facebook advice; we will be providing you with help so your small business can thrive within the social media arenas. We plan to give you insight into how to get your fans to engage with your Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus content. Social Media engagement does translate into customers over time. The objective of the post, in any social network, is to keep your brand in the front most of the consumer markets mind while building trust, respect and confidence for your business.
To accomplish brand recognition, you must post several times per day to ensure maximum reach of your fans. It works best if you stage your post across a 12 - 16-hour period leaving at minimum 1 - 4 hours of a gap in between each post. In doing so, you most likely will reach your maximum number of fans each week.
To achieve success, you must ensure that the content (information posted) is unique each time, inspires engagement and is relevant or parallel to your brand, product or service. It is not detrimental to the social media process to spice up your content periodically by posting a topic not parallel to your brand. Do this sparingly because the posts are intended to keep your business topic and industry in the front most of the fans' mind.
Best times today to post of social networks
The types of content post you create can and will vary based on a number of external factors. We have outlined these varying factors to include but not be limited to the following:
• Seasonality
• Time of Day
• Day of Week
• Month of the year
• Weather Outside
• Pulse of the nation and the world
• Observance of a National Holiday or Famous person
• Trending Topics (Careful - never choose a side or provide sidebar commentary on a topic outside your expertise).
It is recommended that you pre-schedule your Facebook post using Facebook's schedule feature. Leave space in between the schedules to allow for you to slip in a last minute post, quick news flash, photo album updates, cover changes and upcoming events. You also want to leave room to create offers. Facebook enables fan and business pages to create offers for fans or even target these offers directly to a large audience. This is one reason we recommend spacing out posts. A not so obvious reason to space out your post is content SPAMMING. If you over saturate the news feeds of your fans, you could have your fans turn on you. The result could lead to your fans un-liking your page or reporting you to Facebook for delivering SPAMMING content.
Best time of day and week to post content on Facebook
On the topic of time of day and week to post content, for Facebook, you are going to need at minimum 30 Facebook fans before your insight tool is activated. The insight tool will give you a deeper understanding of how your fans interact with your brand. More importantly with the Facebook insight tool you will gain a clear picture as to what time of day, and week your fans are online. Here is a preview of Facebook's insight tool:
Facebook's tool is cleverly called insight. The name of the tool is perfectly titled. From the screenshot above you can see the peak times of day when this account's Facebook fans are online. With this information, you can better plan when to schedule your post.
Type of Content To Post On Social Networks
Instinct is to remind your fans constantly about your product and services. For sure, you need to get your message out, but always remember to keep a good balance of content. Use 28 post to 4 post ratios. For every 28 posts you create 4 of these posts may be a special offer, promotional pitch, or advertising campaign. Pictures of your business in action or your products are not counted being promotional as fans tend to enjoy looking at photos but do not mix images and offers in a single post. Posting offers within content defeats the purpose of displaying a photo, and the engagement will not be as high.
Last but not least, where do you get content? The web is full of excellent content resources. You just need to ensure you fully understand the copyrighting restrictions for each piece of content you post. The best content is content you create. When you post content, you create yourself you avoid researching the copyright restrictions others may enforce. For example, you never want to post content of Prince. Prince will sue you and sue everyone associated with sharing his photo's, videos and music. Most people don't realize this but as of this writing Prince has a 22 million lawsuit against 22 Facebook subscribers that shared a video taken from a recent concert of Prince.
Social Media Optimization (SMO) Conclusion
Overall investing time in social media does pay off. People flock to your Facebook or Google Plus page to get a better understanding of the type of company you are running. People will follow you on Twitter when the information you provide helps them in their day to day interactions. The best way to show off your knowledge about your industry is to spread that information. All content should flow parallel to your brand or business. And most important of all this advice is to have fun creating content for your fans and followers. Good luck.
Also checkout our post on Facebook content topics you should avoid.
