Last week the Washington Post ran a story indicating that: “77 percent of Facebook fan pages have fewer than 1000 fans”. This trend highlights (again) the importance of not only creating your online presence in social media sites, but also actively engaging with other members on those sites. You can’t simply start a Facebook page and assume that fans (who ever that might be) will come.
One of the key aspects we need to take into account while starting a Facebook page is: what will motivate my potential followers to join the group and regularly follow it? In this article we try to offer you some general ideas that can help you address those issues:
- The first thing you need to do is to post new content regularly. Users are looking for relevant and current content, thus you need to provide them with interesting, valuable perspectives or information. References to relevant stories in traditional media or interesting posts in prominent blogs can do the job.
- Another important aspect is the event functionality. Regardless of the topic your page deals with, you should add events relevant to your current and potential followers. In addition to providing your fans with a motivation to regularly follow your page, events also have great reach ability, as they have built in “pass it on” functionality. Furthermore, when one of your followers is attending one of your events, their followers become aware of it via a notification made to their+ news feed.
- As a general rule of thumb, when you launch a contest always include a brief intro telling a little bit about the event. Also, when sending event invites you should keep them as open as possible (e.g. allow guests to invite other people).
- Another important feature that Fan pages have is the ability to send out mass messages. Since many of your fans have a very cluttered Facebook news feed, messages can allow you to quickly keep all members up to date with current information you want to share with them. Your messages will reach your followers inboxes, just like a message from anyone else.
What do you think? Do you have any further tips you want to share with us?
