There are now 15 million small and medium business pages on Facebook business. It is a great way for small businesses to connect with local customers — but many struggle to get any real engagement with their fans.
Most Facebook pages are community or cause pages, followed by local businesses and musicians. But pages are not updating or getting engagement with their fans.
Source: Recommendly report
Recommend.ly reports that there is a low level of engagement and indeed a low level of fans clicking like on the page. 73.3 per cent of pages have less than 1000 fans and 99 per cent have less than 100,000 fans.
Source: Recommendly
SMB page owners also do not update their pages with 83.3 per cent updating their page less than 5 times per month and 79.3 per cent making no updates at all. The challenge is – if you do not update your page, then your fans will not see your update. Facebook shows updates to about 15 per cent of your fans so you need to update regularly to make sure that your post is seen.
Interestingly enough, businesses with category names such as Restaurant or Spa are more active in posting on Facebook and make more than 5 posts per month. Even so, over 50 per cent of local businesses do not have a cover picture for their page.
So what can small businesses do to improve engagement? These 7 tips might help
- Use the promoted posts feature. 500,000 pages are now using promoted posts according to Dan Levy
- Post regularly. Politicians post over 100 updates per month according to the report.
- Take advantage of Facebook’s new look coming soon with a greater focus on photos. Share photos and upload videos which are more likely to be seen by your customers. Join the waiting list for early access to the new news feed too
- Use the scheduled post feature and post regular updates – even at times when you are busy. Your readers will see scheduled posts, images and videos in their feeds
- Add a cover image. 63.9 per cent of all pages do not have a cover image.
- Ask questions
- If you are a politician, Actor/director or Spa, post visual content. You will get a much higher engagement rate on your page.
The most important thing is to keep going. If you despair of getting no responses and no interaction, don’t worry. Each post you make will be seen by some of your fans. you will remain in their mind, even subconsciously and they will be more likely to remember you compared to someone that does not update their page at all.
So treat your page as a live feed advertisement of your brand. Keep it active, keep it visual.
and most importantly – keep it going…
Eileen is a social media strategist and consultant at Amastra, a columnist at ZDNet and author of Working The Crowd: Social Media Marketing for Business. Contact Eileen to find out how she can elevate your brand and help your business become more social.