FSB Associates Blog

Posts Tagged ‘social media tips’

8 Ways to Increase Engagement on Facebook

Wednesday, February 27th, 2013

By Fauzia Burke

As of January 2013, Facebook has 1 billion users. 219 billion photos have been uploaded and there have been 140.3 billion friend connections. The average age of users is about 22.

Clearly Facebook is not going anywhere and although my teens hardly use it anymore, many of us visit the site daily. From a business purpose, engagement is more important than fans. You can have a 1,000 fans but if only 2 people are interacting with you very few people will see your posts on their feed. Take a look at the number of fans you have on your Facebook business page. Now note how many people are “talking about this.” Your goal should be to increase the “talking about” number.

Last year Facebook introduced EdgeRank (also known as News Feed Algorithm or why you see what you see on your news feed). It is important to understand how it works because it makes an impact on how many people see your page. Brittany Botti, Social Media Marketing Professional explained it simply: “The more your fans like, comment, share, or click through on your posts, the more often they will see your posts in their NewsFeed.”

Have you noticed you tend to see posts from the same people in your news feed? It’s probably the people you interact with most. For your business page to show up in more people’s feeds, you should improve the engagement by mixing up your posts.

Here’s a few ideas for increasing engagement:

According to a study by SocialCode, the best time to post on Facebook is after 7pm EST on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.

Ask questions. Find out more about your fans

Post photos. It is the most popular type of post

Use quotes from books you love

Change the cover photo regularly. It’s more fun and keeps people engaged

Graphics from Pinterest (just make sure you give credit to the creator)

Post short “thoughts” or “comments” – Posts that are 5 -10 words perform best

I hear “Fill in the blank” gets lots of engagement. I have not tried it myself yet, but seems like fun

The most popular type of post is text only (short, funny, thoughtful ones). The least popular are updates with links. Add a link sparingly only when you need their attention and have a call to action. It’s important to be selective about the links you add as they are the least effective in promoting engagement.

If you are only on Facebook because you want to sell something, I am not sure any social networking will really work for you. Facebook allows us to know our “partners” better. Today partners are our clients, customers, and readers. It is because of them we are in business and by treating them with regard and respect, I think we’ll be in business longer. Of course, social networking is a business investment so you should totally promote your company/book/product, just mix it up. Hope this is helpful.

What have you found to be effective in encouraging engagement on Facebook?

Author Bio
Fauzia Burke is the Founder and President of FSB Associates, a digital publicity and marketing firm specializing in creating awareness for books and authors. For online publicity, book publishing and social media news, follow Fauzia on Twitter: @FauziaBurke. To talk with FSB and ask your book publicity questions, please join us on Facebook.

Tags: business, facebook, social media tips, social networking
Posted in Branding, Social Media Tips | Comments Off

12 Social Media Tools for Publicity

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011

by Fauzia Burke

The explosion of social media in the last few years has brought with it a whole slew of social media applications and tools designed to help publicists deliver and monitor better results. As I have written before, I think social media has been a huge help for publicity. However, choosing the tools is important in helping you save time and be effective. I’ve compiled a list of 12 tools that lighten the social media workload at FSB, and I hope you find them helpful as well.

Blog Searches:

Blogpulse: You can search for a URL, name or topic. I think it gives good results for a given topic, even though I’m not always crazy about the results. However, every now and then I find things here that are missed by Google or Google alerts.

Google Blog Search: This is the most thorough blog searching tool around. You can find blogs for any topic.

Technorati: This is a great site of blogs by topic and ranking. Very helpful.

Digital Presence Assessment and Management:

Addictomatic: This site is very helpful in gauging a digital footprint as it searches the web for latest news, blog posts, videos and images. A cool element is that you can customize the dashboard by simply dragging the boxes around.

Hootsuite: We use Hootsuite in the office and even pay for the pro version. I think it is an excellent program that we find more reliable than Tweetdeck. You can manage several accounts and schedule posts for Twitter and Facebook.

How Socialable: This site gives you an evaluation of your brand’s visibility. It’s not great for personal brands, but a good tool for big brands, like your company.

Klout: One of the most popular Twitter popularity tools, Klout measures influence rather than just followers.

Social Mention: This site allows you to search an author, company or topic across the Web. You can get results from 100 social media sites in one place. My favorite part is that it gives you sentiment (positive, neutral or negative) of the mentions all over the Web, along with top keywords and top hashtags. It’s handy.

TweetReach: This is one of my favorite sites. It allows you to search a topic, author, handle or name and see how many people were reached by those Tweets. You can also see who sent the Tweets and how many followers they have. Very helpful for publicists looking for influencers.

TwitterCounter: I love this site. It allows you to see the Twitter stats for any handle. You can see if the trend is for gaining followers or losing them. Also shows you how many Tweets are made everyday by any handle. Good for research and for monitoring the success of your company feeds.

Topic Search:

Google Trends: If you are working on a news topic, this is an excellent source as it gives you insights into the traffic and geographic visit patterns.

Twazzup: This site allows you to filter news from live Twitter content. It’s good to see trending topics and influencers for a given subject. Better for topic than an author’s name.

Having a social media platform for communicating is extremely important for the success of your publicity campaigns. The majority of the tools presented in this list can make communicating your messages on target and easy to manage/track. I invite you to choose the ones that help make your social media experience more productive and better still, enjoyable. Do you have a favorite tool not on this list?

For the latest on web publicity, social media news, and personal branding, follow Fauzia on Twitter: @FauziaBurke.