Ten Practical Steps for Improving Your Facebook Presence

• Tweet
• 
  
• 
  
• 
  Pin It
  

• Tweet
• 
  

Now that many brands are advertising Facebook presences ahead of their actual web presences, it is more important than ever that we understand the conversations that are happening on brand Facebook pages. Are they positive or not? What type of content engages fans? Why do fans actually become fans in the first place?

Because we are curious about these things, we decided to conduct our own research by analyzing 4000 posts from the top 100 brands to see what we could learn. The results have been collated into the Beyond Brand Interaction Study. To save you reading it, we have also put together a video which summarizes our findings and collates other freely available facts and figures we found interesting.

One of the challenges with data analysis is to create some specific actionable insights so we have pulled together our Top 10 Practical Steps to building and engaging your community on Facebook:

1. Put together an incentive program for your loyal fans
2. Increase the use of images and rich media to increase likes
3. Use polls to increase comment levels
4. Aim for a ratio of brand comments to fan comments of 1:10
5. Funnel customer service issues into the appropriate channels and away from Facebook
6. Clearly signpost news distribution from within the corporate facebook presence
7. Ask the fans for ideas for content
8. Integrate your Facebook presence with all other social presences and web presence
9. Let other fans handle a lot of the other negative comments
10. Benchmark your Facebook presence against other brands in your sector

We can’t promise that this will get you as many fans as Coca Cola but we can guarantee if you follow these steps you will be well on the way to building a happy fan base.

Our full white paper is also available here.

Guest blogger, David Hargreaves, is CEO of Beyond, Next Fifteen’s specialist digital consultancy that was launched earlier this year. It works for clients such as Google, YouTube, Genentech and Cisco.