Increasing Your Visibility on Facebook
According to Expanded Ramblings, Facebook had 1.23 billion users as of January 2014. No wonder Facebook is so popular among digital marketers, it has an increasingly large and captive audience.
However, not everyone who adopts Facebook as a means to increase the visibility of their business is successful. You cannot force people to read and share your messages or information. The trick is to get people to develop a sense of curiosity about your products or services and start talking about your brand. The best way to do it is to give them content that they find interesting and that adds value to their lives. Here are a few tips on how you can increase the visibility of your business on Facebook.
Achieve a Higher Ranking on News Feeds
By tagging other posts to the content on your page, you can increase the visibility of your post by a huge margin. Such content can be anything from video clips, celebrity posts, images or anything interesting that you found on Facebook, Twitter, your favourite blogs, etc. It increases the chances that your post will be seen, not only by the people who are following your page, but also by people who have liked the content that you linked from.
A good way to do this is to look at Facebook’s ‘trending topics’ feature and try to create situations in which you can tag those popular subjects. It is important to note, only posts that have a number of comments and/or likes receive a high rank on users’ news feeds, but you can only get those comments and likes when people visit your page and see the post. However, if you manage to obtain a high rank on users’ news feeds, people will naturally migrate to your page.
Many marketers are concerned that their visibility on many news feeds have gone down, even though they are spending more time and effort than ever promoting their Facebook pages. Some are even troubled by the notion that Facebook is trying to coerce marketers to go “all in” for paid advertising. Whether this is true or not, the competition for a share of the marketing pie has increased over the years and businesses have to fight harder than ever.
Understanding EdgeRank
Understanding how Facebook grades a post is critical to increasing your visibility. Facebook’s post-ranking algorithm (called EdgeRank) uses a formula to select which posts will be shown on any number of users’ news feeds. Facebook has identified the three key elements of this formula as affinity, weight & time.
Affinity refers to the strength of your relationship with your followers, which in turn depends on your interactions with them. Users who frequently share, like or comment on your posts have a higher affinity for your posts than other users in your friends list. In terms of weight, Facebook claims it gives more clout to comments than likes. The last element to the formula is time – the older a post, the less relevant it becomes, and the less likely it will appear in the news feeds of your fans.
Skip the Text – Post Photos and Videos Often
Many people find lengthy text posts boring. Another drawback is that they do not stand out. You can increase your engagement with your users up to 180% by uploading a photo album, 120% by uploading a single photo and 100% with videos. These are impressive margins.
Some other methods to increase your visibility on Facebook are holding a caption contest, posting inspirational images or quotes, holding competitions, posting funny comics or videos, giving away offers and more. Be creative with your engagement tactics! Your audience will thank you.