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Facebook for Bloggers with Scott Ayres

Facebook for Bloggers with Scott Ayres

Facebook

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, and breaking through the noise is harder than ever. How do you get past the images with quotes, and reshares of funny photos?

I think it all depends on your goals for Facebook. Often times we fall into a pattern of just copying what everyone else is doing because that “worked”. But just because posting idiotic memes works for George Takei doesn’t mean it will work for me!

You have to be yourself and be consistent with that message. The challenge however is avoid the temptation to always post links to your product or company, especially when you’re in the online marketing world. Be human and interact with your followers/friends, and then every once in a while mix in a link or two. And yeah, sometimes posting a silly cat video is needed!

Personal profiles, like pages, have went through several changes over the years, the biggest of which is the ability for people to “follow” you. With the follow functionality being similar to “liking” a Facebook page, is a personal profile sufficient? What are the advantages of having a page?

That’s a tough question. It all depends on your brand I think. As an online “entrepreneur”, you usually are the brand so having a page may be necessary. But for bloggers, artists, speakers, athletes and etc just having a personal profile should be enough. The main advantages with using a page is to run ads to posts, your apps on the page and etc. You can’t do any of that with a profile.

But if you don’t care about collecting emails and etc. then a profile may be all you need. That’s what I’ve personally chosen to do. I deleted the 2-3 pages I had that were really just about the stuff I was doing or promoting and just deal with my profile now. It allows me to be human and still at times “sell” stuff. The best at running a personal profile and page at the same time with the same name is Mari Smith. She has it figured out. I covered how well she does this in a recent blog post you can check out here.

Quite often I come across a blog who’s Facebook page is automatically feeding in new posts through a tool like NetworkedBlogs. Is that a good move or are people leaving a lot of engagement on the table?

I personally don’t like to automatically feed blog posts to pages on Facebook. It’s okay to do to Twitter, but not Facebook. Facebook is all about timing and having space between posts. If you push your blog out 3 minutes after you just posted something else on Facebook, your post likely won’t be seen. Or worse yet, because you’re overwhelming the news feed of your fans, they get pissed off, hide the post or unlike you.

You lose too much control when posting this way IMHO. Now, planning your post is smart and everyone running a page should do it, I’ve been doing that for years. But when you plan your posts, you know when it’s going to hit your page, and are ensured that the posts are spaced out appropriately.

Speaking of engagement, Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm impacts all posts, and with pages, on average only 16% of their fans actually see their posts. How do you get this number up, and is it worth investing into things such as Sponsored posts?

Well, Edgerank is technically dead now, but there is still an algorithm in play on the news feed. The latest news from Facebook seems to point to the fact that a different algorithm is being used for posts from people and from pages, which makes things rather difficult to understand. You get this number up by strategically posting updates that get engagement. Regardless of your brand, people typically don’t only want to hear about your brand or product. They may love you to death, but won’t comment on every update if it’s just about yourself or your industry.

I personally would suggest posting Questions, Fill-in the blanks, and funny images to get engagement up. Then, mix in link posts between them to your site or updates about your industry. I’m not saying flood Facebook with junk posts though. Figure out your audience and find out what they are more likely to engage in. Also, keep in mind that when you post a link post, engagement will be almost zero as you’re driving traffic to your site, and that’s good news. But don’t expect Likes, Comments and Shares to be high when posting links.

If simply posting isn’t working for your page, you’ll need to try running Sponsored Stories from time to time. Again, it all depends on your page and your audience. If you run a Sponsored story on a crappy post that didn’t get any engagement to begin with, you’re wasting your money, but if a post starts to get some traction, it’s a good idea to run an ad with it to get more engagement.

You also should be running ads to get targeted fans to your page. I think too many times page owners beg, borrow and steal fans to increase the Like count, but end up with a bunch of people that could care less about their product or page. I’d rather have 100 engaged fans than 1000 that will never comment. So make sure you target ads towards people that will be interested in your product. Your mom probably doesn’t need to like your page!

Aside from Post Planner of course, what are some of your favorite Facebook related tools or apps?

I love ShortStack, not just because they have great apps for pages, but because they are great people. Very laid back, not pretentious and provide great content. Jon Loomer is my go-to guy when I want to learn more about Facebook ads. By far, he’s the leading expert on this currently in our space. I also love the new updates to the Page Manager app for Android. You can now create a shortcut on your phone that is specifically just for your page, which makes it super quick to access and manage comments, messages and posts.

Where can people learn more about you, and check out your stuff?

They can follow me on Facebook of course, check out my podcasts or The Social Media Buzz.

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