But here is the thing, many businesses don’t seem to understand that their page likes/follower number is only a number, it means very little!

Facebook is a community, and there is no secret or magic formula to instant success! Gaining hundreds of new page likes in a short space of time is only actually useful if ALL of these new page likes are within your target audience.

Build YOUR Community

Let us pose a question to you. Would you prefer to have an audience of 500 people who were interested in your business, products and services and who are likely to use your business either now or in the near future OR would you prefer to have an audience of 50,000 people who scroll past your posts paying them very little attention or even hide them from their timeline?

We’d hope you would prefer an interested 500 strong audience. People who will stop, react and engage with your posts.

Surely a bigger audience is better!

The biggest issue with the post we spoke about earlier is the types of people being invited to join your audience.

How about an example? Let’s say your business is small nail salon based in Newcastle city centre. You ask your followers to invite everyone on their friends list. Pick out one of your followers who might do this for you. They click Invite All and BAM, they’ve invited their dad, uncle, great uncle, a vast number of male friends who think a manicure is just trimming their nails with the clippers, 138 people with whom they went to University. 112 of these people live in Plymouth, 8 live in Devon and the remaining 18 are scattered across the globe. None of these are YOUR audience. They’re people who will either ignore the request or will accept it and then begin to ignore your posts, the latter being the ones who will affect your page growth the most. They have all just become a pointless statistic on your business page.

So how can you grow your page?

Ensure that you are present and consistent! Post daily, at times when most of your followers are online (information you can get from your page insights).

Build relationships with your audience. If they comment on your content – reply! Have a conversation with them. Conversations with your audience can often highlight what they want to see from you and what you can do to convert their interest into a purchase.

If you feel like you need to, use a Facebook ad to speed up the process. You can target your adverts audience to be YOUR people, people who will be interested in what you do, what you have to say and will have conversations with you.

Think about the type of content that you are posting. Does your post give knowledge, make people laugh or make them think? If not what’s the reason behind posting it? If you sell a service, why do people need your service? What are the issues or pain points which need your service as their solution? Once you find out what problems people face that your service fixes you can focus your content around helping them to minimise or resolve these pain points. If you sell a product, why do people need that product and what difference will it make to them and their lives?

We get it! Right now, we’re living in unprecedented times and we are all doing everything that we can do to ensure that we survive throughout this and come out of the other side strong and ready to go, but don’t undo all of the hard work up to this point by copying and pasting an invite all viral post. If you need any advice on how to grow your business on Social Media either organically or the best way to make use of Facebook ads for this purpose, get in touch. We’d love to have a conversation with you about it.

The post Page Likes! Invite All? Please, Don’t! It’s more damaging than you think! appeared first on Social Plus.

At Social+, we’ve taken the hard work out of it for you! We have spent time trialling and using different tools in our business. Here is what we recommend:

Images

We all need to be aware of copyright rules, using someone else’s work without their consent is against the law and you can be hit with a hefty fine for doing so. It goes without saying that finding good quality royalty free (which just means the creator has already given consent for their image to be used) is important. We use a range of websites to download images from, all of which are royalty free. Try Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay for your general photographs and CleanPNG for more clipart style images.

We all want to make our content original, to make original imagery, we use Canva. In Canva, you can create images to the correct size for the social media platform the content is intended for, this ensures that none of your image is lost when its displayed to your followers.  Canva also has a handy app to download to your phone so you can create and download images to your phone.

Hootsuite

If you use Twitter, LinkedIn or Pinterest in your business, then scheduling is simple using Hootsuite. We use Hootsuite for our own business as well as managing the scheduling for our clients too. You can add hashtags, images and links in the easy to use composer. Hootsuite is also available as a mobile app.

Planoly

Instagram does not have its own inbuilt scheduler and so people often report finding Instagram hard to keep on top of. Remembering to post at your business’s optimum time of day and keeping an aesthetically pleasing feed going can be difficult. With Planoly, you can upload your images and schedule posts and stories to post at a time of day you specify! Planoly is also available to download as a mobile app where you can do your scheduling and receive notifications confirming posting has been done.

Facebook

Facebook scheduling is a little bit different, we always recommend that Facebook scheduling is done on Facebook. We’ve done testing on different scheduling tools and compared them to the results of posts scheduled on Facebook and have found that they tend to be shown to a wider audience than those scheduled on 3^rd party apps. We use the Pages for Facebook app on our phones for when we are out and about to manage posts and notifications.

Business Manager for Facebook

Because Facebook pages are attached to our own personal Facebook accounts, it is so easy to miss important business notifications from your Page amongst all the rest of the notifications you receive on a daily basis. Therefore, we always recommend that when using a laptop or desktop computer you set up a Business Manager for Facebook account. You can find Business Manager here and its as easy as signing in to your own Facebook to sign up! Business Manager shows only your business page notifications, ensuring that no comment or message gets missed.

Insights and Analytics

All social media platforms when used for business purposes have insights. We always recommend that these insights are analysed on (at the very least) a monthly basis. These insights allow you to analyse your social media accounts to see what is working, what isn’t and can give you a great starting point on your next week/month/quarter’s strategy.

Strategy Planning

Do you plan a strategy when tackling your business social media platforms? If you do, then well done! Strategy planning keeps you focused, it means that you know what you will post on which day, on which platform and why! If you don’t, then our next question for you to ponder is, why not? If you need help on strategy planning or simply would like a copy of our easy to use and insightful content calendar, please visit our contact us page and drop us a message.

Video Content

Video content works well for engaging with your followers, whether it be a video you have uploaded yourself or you have gone “live” on Facebook or Instagram. But it is important to try and ensure that the video content is accessible to all. Some of your followers may not watch video with sound on, will they miss out on important points in your video? Subtitling your video content makes it accessible to those people who don’t watch with the sound on or even for whatever reason are unable to listen to the video content. Adding subtitles to video is easy with Kapwing. There is a free version of this service which adds a Kapwing watermark, removing the Kapwing watermark is easy by upgrading to the paid version of this app.

We’ve written about a lot of different tips and tricks in this post. All of which we use personally in our day to day business and when we are delivering training. If you require training on any of the above, then do not hesitate to send us a message on our Facebook page or via the contact us section of our website and we will only be too happy to discuss training packages with you!

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