Your time is precious, you are busy running your business, so why waste time and energy on Facebook?

Well, Facebook can be very effective for you and your business, it is a powerful marketing tool and of course a great way to interact and engage with your customers and followers. But, and this is a big but, are you wasting time and energy with it?

I am going to show your 5 ways that you could be wasting valuable time on Facebook.

As usual I`m not going to waste any time and keep it nice and easy for you, so let`s get straight in to it…

Number 1 – Promotional Content

Creating content is always one of the biggest issues with any business and is very time consuming. Are you wasting time creating the wrong content? special offer sign

Have you noticed your organic reach declining on your business page recently? If you have then the chances are your posts are falling foul of Facebook`s recent algorithm update where it now penalises promotional posts and this is the reason why your reach has been declining. Facebook wants admins and editors of business pages to ditch the sales type posts in favour of interesting and educational posts that add real value. As I always state “people DO NOT go on Social Media to be sold to!”

If your reach has declined of late have a look at the type of posts you or your team have been creating, use Facebook Insights (here`s a great beginners guide on Facebook Insights for you) to see your posts and monitor the engagement and reach.

Number 2 – How long have you just taken to create that post?

All the specialists, me included, keep on telling you that you need to be posting fantastic content to increase those Likes, Shares and Comments, and yes this is true. But don`t waste too much time on this. Don`t waste hours trying to compose the perfect Facebook post.

Do you know what? In my experience the most engaged posts are normally the simplest ones, the current newsworthy and relevant items that you can just quickly link too. Use Google Alerts for quick inspiration, again look at your Facebook Insights to see what got a good reaction last time, run your posts past your colleagues to see what they found the most interesting. Never be afraid to recycle a good post from the past, just reword it slightly or change the image and never be afraid to link out to external websites and content, if it is relevant and interesting to your followers it will get engagement.

Number 3 – Wasting time arguing

Have you ever done this? Do you still do it? businesswoman arguing

Well if so STOP!

Many people are likely to post negative comments or look for a reaction from a business. Many like to complain in public. As tempting as it may seem, whatever you think do NOT get in to an argument.

By all means reply to genuine negative feedback and comments but I advise against getting in to heated discussions and discussions on competitors pages and timelines. Yes you most certainly need to respond in a timely manner and a courteous one to comments, good or bad, but if the comments are not valid then do not waste any time with them, if your service and products are good enough then 9 times out of 10 your satisfied clients and customers will respond for you!

Number 4 – Instagram and Facebook

What is it with Instagram and Facebook?

Yes Instagram is part of Facebook but why oh why do people connect the two?

Yes it might save time

Yes images are good for engagement

Yes I should post automatically from Instagram to Facebook…NO!!

Why?

For a start you may be serving completely different audiences on each platform, what might seem a good post and image on one will not necessarily be good for the other. 11+ hashtags may be good for Instagram, it certainly is not for Facebook!

Number 5 – Are you irresponsible? crazy businessman

As a Facebook Page you can like other pages. A good strategy to engage with others but be careful. As when you Like another page it could possibly display in your left hand column on your page, if you have liked a competitor or another brand that you wouldn`t want your visitors to see then a link to their page could appear on your page.

A useful feature in your page settings is the Featured Likes. Use this to select a few businesses that you would be happy for their page link to appear on your page.

All you need to do is go to your page and do the following:

  1. > Settings
  2. > Featured
  3. > Edit Featured Likes
  4. > Add the pages you are happy for to appear on your News Feed.

Do you have any ways or methods in which you save time and energy on your Facebook Page?

Please let me know as I`d be interested to find out how you are getting on with using Facebook.

Until next time

Martin

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