With over a billion users across the globe and counting, around 70 percent of which are active at least on a monthly basis (data as of June 2015), Facebook is truly a very potent SMO platform for building a community around your company or product brand.
How can your community manager make the most out of this site’s features? Check out the list of hacks below:
Vary your content. A simple spreadsheet can help you master this. Based on the 4-1-1 rule devised by Andrew Davis (who authored the brand management bible Brandscaping), create a listing of content ideas, from news articles and infographics, to photos and videos. The 4-1-1 Rule means that for every four (4) posts of content from influencers, you will post only (1) original informative content (soft-sell), and (1) promotional/sales-related content (hard-sell). This ratio creates balance in the eyes of your audience, so that you establish yourself both as a veritable source of industry news, and a legitimate business entity with reliable products and/or services.
Create a daily schedule for posting, and use the “post later” feature. Every day, your content manager should scour the news for relevant material, and paste the URLs and indicate whether it must be posted immediately, or can wait for posting at another time within the week. They say that in marketing, timing is always of the essence. Well, that adage takes another level of truth in social media, where the key is to be among, if not the first to post something, to increase the likelihood of its virality. Now, there is a “post later” feature for community pages to aid you in scheduling, so take advantage of it for material of the kind that you would constantly talk about, such as content about your corporate values, or descriptions of your staple products and services. That said, you can even plan posts for an entire week, and just add the hashtags based on the trending topics of the day.
Cross-post, and forge partnerships with other pages/groups. By cross-posting, we mean that your manager should become a member of different related groups (say, a group of mountaineers or triathletes, if you are selling outdoor sports products), and share the page’s post there. Currently, Facebook only allows you to post as an individual, not as the page. To avoid being tagged as spam, forge a partnership with these groups, and find a way to offer a benefit, say, freebies for the organization, as they let you advertise among their members. Moreover, make different creative and long and short versions of your post, for re-purposing on Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest, among other social media platforms. Make sure that each material you prepare is perfectly shareable on each of your company’s social media accounts. A smart community manager knows how to create traction for each account, where they do not compete and instead boost each other’s exposure.
To learn more SMO hacks for effective social media marketing, get in touch with us here at GreyBox Creative today.