How to Communicate Effectively on Facebook Pages

One of the primary challenges which social media marketers frequently face is to build online communities from scratch and keep the audience engaged. Facebook pages are the hottest property these days to build communities for brands and organizations to engage with users. Now, due to improper planning and lack of in-depth knowledge, most of the conversationlists (social media executives) end up huffing & puffing and somehow push forward the day’s posts on numerous pages they are managing, which leaves them no time to instigate a conversation and the result is a poorly engaged communit usually built using Facebook Adverts. So, how can we communicate in an effective way which should serve the purpose of brands? Here are few ideas:

#1. Define the Communication Tone

First, its very important to understand the brand’s tone, what kind of brand it is. Whether it is a brand that is hip and youth centric or it is a brand targeted at corporates? There can be many more possibilities too. This will define the tone of your communication on Facebook.

#2. Create Content Categories

It is very important to create content categories, so that you have substantial variety of posts which you can spread across the week. For instance, Polls, Humour, Trivia, Facts etc can be some useful categories to start with. You can experiment with these categories on different days to know what kind of content works on which day. This ensures that users don’t get bored by the same kind of content everyday.

#3. Plan in advance

To bring quality to the content, a very effective way is to write, refine and finalize the copies at least a week in advance of posting them. There are few brands like Capital Foods (Ching’s secret) which plan a few months in advance both for Facebook as well as Youtube! (They are highly active on Youtube these days, though not much on Facebook).

An example of a quality post

#4. Inertia

Facebook has a concept of edge rank, according to which the better the engagement with fans, higher will be the impressions of the posts. And the few initial minutes are most important for this. You can see it for yourself, if a particular post gets good number of likes & comments in the initial few minutes, it will keep on getting likes & comments for a larger part of the day. Although some people may deride this, it is always a good practice to make few likes & leave relevant comments internally to give the post momentum.

 #5. Sustenance

After implementing the above points, you need to sustain the momentum by driving the conversation as a brand. This includes responding to fans as well as asking them questions that interest them enough to respond and participate. Also, don't forget to thank your fans wherever possible, its always good to give back and make one feel special. Running contests once in a while is another effective way to keep the fans excited but you should not overdo it as one is already wary of the 'professional online contestants' these days, who use social media solely for this purpose & are seen frequently across different pages.

Any more techniques you use to communicate better on Facebook pages? I am sure there are. Please share in the comment box below.

Image courtesy stoneysteiner