What to Post on Facebook: Facebook for Business 101
How to use Facebook for Business: What to Post
Question: What type of content do I post to Facebook? How often? & Why?
Short Answer: Post incredibly niche specific posts to your Facebook page between 1 and 2 times per day for a small following to get more eyes on your page and to (hopefully) get those page likes up!
Long answer:
This question is one of the first I usually get regarding Facebook for business. It can seem overwhelming to have to find content to share!
When first building up your page, if you don’t know what type of content or what topics to post about don’t worry, you’re not alone. Most businesses in the beginning stages of developing their Facebook strategy don’t know exactly what to post.
It’s not easy to know precisely what will resonate with your specific followers from day one. So start with some basic stuff about your industry, more specifically, start with posting the articles, videos and pictures that catch your attention while surfing the web. Most everything on the internet can be shared on social media, just look for your preferred social media platform’s icon and share away!
I’d suggest posting once or twice a day for a small business in the early stages of developing a social media strategy and following.
Posting once or twice a day will allow you to tailor articles to your audience over a period of time instead of bombarding them 5 posts a day that they absolutely do not care about. Posting too frequently without a specific focus will either result in people un-liking your Facebook page or “hiding” all your future posts from showing up in their newsfeed! Both of which is like taking 8 steps backwards in your overall social media strategy.
Why people will “un-like” your Facebook business page…
- The posts are irrelevant to your industry.
- You’re posting too frequently.
- You’re posts are too political, religious or related to other controversial topics.
- Your Facebook business page is too personal (don’t post pictures of your kids, pets, etc. unless you can relate to your business or industry somehow.)
Where & how to find content to share
If you need more content than just the stuff that catches your attention while surfing the web or if you never search the web in the first place, then try the techniques below. Also, start thinking about what you can teach your followers and what’s unique about your business.
Research your competitors to check out what they’re doing on social media and adapt it to your business. I’m not saying copy them flat out, especially if it doesn’t seem like their strategies are working, but if you see a theme amongst all of your competitors you should probably hop on that bandwagon.
- Youtube videos
- Do a search on Youtube with keywords related to your industry. Pick the videos that have a lot of views, that way you know it’s already a popular video.
- Pictures/articles from Pinterest
- Over the past few years Pinterest’s search feature has really improved. You can start by searching for just one relevant word to your industry and once you hit search, the most popular categories for that word will appear at the top, so you’re able to refine by popularity from the get-go!
- You can also search for phrases or a combination of keywords and see what results you get!
- Posts shared by connections on LinkedIn
- If you have a LinkedIn account, search through it to find posts that your connections are sharing and posting.
- Use StumbleUpon to find unique content to share
- StumbleUpon is an awesome discovery engine. It helps find interesting and relevant things across the web and lets you tailor a unique dashboard specifically for your interests. The more you use it the more niche specific the articles that appear on your dashboard become. You can even share right from your StumbleUpon dashboard.
- Create your own content!
- Start blogging- it’s one of the best ways to drive content to your website and social media channels
- Edit your pictures to make them more visually appealing. Personally, I use Canva for most of my original content. You can easily add icons, graphics, pictures and text to any picture for free and you don’t need much experience in editing photos.
How to tailor content based on your Facebook business page’s insights
Every Facebook page comes with Facebook “Insights” where you can analyze the results of your posts; start by looking for the posts that get the most views, shares, likes and comments start to favor those types of topics. If you notice that videos between 1 minute and 2 minutes receive 50% more views than those videos that are 5+ minutes long then you know you’re audience doesn’t have much of an attention span and you’ll need to ensure that future video posts are short.
The pep talk…
Social media for small business can seem incredibly overwhelming not to mention confusing with so many different types of social media channels to choose from. My recommendation –relieve some of the stress and start with a Facebook business page. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself. If posting once or twice a day seems like a daunting task then make it a goal to post 3 times a week instead. Start slow! It takes time to build a successful social media strategy.
And I’m always here for help! Contact me if you’d like someone to “show you the ropes.”