7 Simple Ways to Supercharge Your Facebook Page

At our Social Media Marketing for Small Business seminar in Edinburgh on Tuesday, Julie Niehoff from Constant Contact ran a session excitedly titled “How to Supercharge Your Facebook Page“. Never ones to miss an opportunity to pass off someone else’s knowledge as our own,we thought we’d share the seven ways she highlighted for keeping your Facebook fans happy and engaged:

1) Share Quotes

Like most responsible adults, we tend to shy away from sharing cheesy quotes on Facebook – but as Julie pointed out, the fact remains – they work. And to be fair, not all quotes are cheesy – some are funny, cheeky or ironic – which might fit better with your brand. It’s also worth putting the photo on a quote, since photos attract more interest on Facebook and are more likely to be shared.

2) Fill in the blanks

The clever thing about writing a statement, leaving a word blank and asking people to add a comment with a suggestion for filling the blank is that it encourages Comments, which are way better than Likes, though not quite as good as Shares (it’s worth keeping that hierarchy in mind). Again, this tactic has occasionally been hijacked by cheese-mongers – but there’s no reason to be a _blanker. With some creative thinking, fill in the blanks can be insightful, revealing or hilarious opportunity to engage your fans.

3) Share Genuine News

With the caveat that “news” means “something that’s of genuine interest beyond your own family and friends”, there’s no harm in posting news to your Facebook Page. If your fans really are interested in what you do, they are likely to congratulate you – or in the unlikely event that you’ve shared a recent PR disaster – commiserate with you. Either way, you’ll be banking those Likes, Comment and Shares kiddo!

4) Pose Questions

Just asking a question on your Facebook Page doesn’t often elicit much response – but by limiting the response time to just a few hours – after which time you’ll post the answer up – you can add an element of competition and draws people back to your page. By inviting them to post their answer as a comment, you are also encouraging valuable interaction; and if you want to make it really easy (strongly advisable) make your question a straightforward multiple choice.

By the way- this isn’t against Facebook’s competition rules. If there’s no winner, it’s not against the rules.

5) Post resources

Links to genuinely valuable resources or 3rd party blog posts are well worth posting up. The reason is simple: people like sharing high-quality resources with their friends. The upside for you, of course, is that a”share” is the most valuable form of interaction you can get on Facebook.

6) Run a competition or quiz

Tools like Constant Contact’s Social Campaigns platform, Agorapulse and Wildfire! all enable you to host competitions on your Facebook Page. These work through through third party apps on tabs and are configured so that you don’t break Facebook’s rules. We recently used one of these tools to run a competition for a client and increased their Facebook fan-base by 25% in a little over 3 days – with corresponding increases in reach and engagement. Try out the Social Media Quiz on our Facebook Page.

7) Offer a download

The tried-and-tested ‘free download behind a Like-gate’ continues to attract fans for thousands of Facebook Pages. The better quality the download (usually a PDF), the more likely people are to share the offer with friends and colleagues – so it’s worth spending time on. Five pages of plagarised platitudes in large print simply won’t cut it. Again, we’ve used Constant Contact’s Social Campaigns for this.

Our Social Times is partnering with Chinwag to run Facebook Marketing 2012, an essential 1-day conference, in London on July 18th (including a training bootcamp on 17th July). We will also be running it in New York and Singapore later in 2012.  Contact us for details.

We also have a free Facebook marketing webinar on June 20th. The webinar will be fully interactive and will focus around ‘How to Identify and Reward True Brand Advocates’. Register for free.

[Disclaimer: Agorapulse and Constant Contact are partners of Our Social Times]