Last night’s WordPress North East was one of my favourites, with a great turnout with people of all experiences and uses for WordPress.
Amanda Dixon of North East Social Media kindly donated her time to provide the latest advice on using social media for businesses with WordPress website; I’ve captured a small selection of some of the key topics and techniques she covered below.
Tips for improving your business Facebook page
Most people are familiar with Facebook, but mastering your Facebook business page can be a trickier task: how do you attract more likes, and gain a better reach for your posts?
- Brand your page. Ensure your Facebook business page uses your logo or a photo of yourself (which is most appropriate to your business). Upload a background image too.
- Keep your posts sales-talk free. Facebook has recently started reducing visibility on obviously sales-orientated posts with obvious – probably because it would rather you sold on Facebook with paid adverts! Facebook wants businesses to build a community around your business. Having said that, it’s still OK to post the odd link to your website or a specific page or blog post.
- Engagement is king. Create content which will engage your page’s followers – content they will like, love or comment on. The more engagement your post has, the more visibility it will receive. As a rough guide, expect a post to be shown to around 2% of your page’s followers initially. Based on the engagement of this initial 2%, your post will then be shown to around 8% of your pages followers. After that, your post will be more widely shown in your followers’ Facebook timelines.
- You’ll get a better reach on your posts if you don’t use an app to schedule or post on your behalf. So, it’s better to post content directly to Facebook (but you can still use Facebook’s post-scheduling tools).
- Videos are great for engagement, but for best reach ensure they are uploaded directly to Facebook. Links to YouTube videos tend to have less reach, because Facebook wants to keep users on its own site.
- Feed your Instagram account in to your Facebook feed: Facebook are keen to encourage users on Instagram now that they own the photo-sharing app, and you can expect more reach if you link your Instagram account to Facebook.
- Livestream! Facebook’s relatively new live-streaming feature allows you to broadcast video to your followers, allowing them to comment and react as you’re broadcast. Livestreams on Facebook alert your followers whilst you’re live, and can encourage higher levels of interaction – which is what Facebook wants!
- Set your preferred Facebook page audience. Don’t forget to set your preferred page audience in your page’s settings. This relatively new feature allows better targeting of your posts on Facebook, and can also help with paid advertising.
- Use hashtags. Yes, you can use hashtags on Facebook! Hashtags essentially provide a way to find posts on similar topics; try adding two relevant hashtags for each post and see if your post reach improves. If your post is about WordPress North East, for example, you could add #wordpressnortheast as a hashtag.
So, now you know how to use a Facebook page like a pro, what about integration with WordPress? There are many tools and plugins available, some of which are limited by the WordPress theme you’re using. We’ve found AddThis is a great social sharing tool and makes embedding share buttons very easy, and also provides analytics on your shares.