Increasing Fan Page Reach

Welcome to another Facebook Friday from CUDigitals. This blog series will help you understand how to effectively use your Facebook Fan Page as a digital scrapbook designer. Because of the way Facebook calculates which posts to deliver to your fans, it is no longer enough to just post new product announcements and sales graphics on your page and still expect good engagement, which translates to more of of your posts being seen.

Today we are going to look at an important paradigm shift in how digital designers need to look at their Fan Pages. Making this change will get you into a different mindset that will allow you to create content for you page that can dramatically increase your post reach and engagement.
Back in the "good old days", designers really could just get by with using their page as a place to share their store news, blog posts and sales announcements: an free ad channel. That was before Facebook started emphasizing paid posts. In retrospect, it's not all that surprising that there was a push to monetize the platform. Unfortunately, many designers just didn't switch their page strategy and got hit with the typical 2-3% post views (out of all fans) that folks in every other industry were also experiencing.

Now, unless you're happy spending your time posting to your page with practically NO RETURN, you just need to get it OUT of your mind that the main purpose of your page is to advertise your products. Your main goal is tribe building, which I discussed a little bit last week.
So how should you look at your fan page?

I mentioned in a previous post that last month, I attended a Facebook marketing presentation at a big conference. The speaker manages a page of over 70,000 radio station fans. Obviously a successful page. The audience that day was made of up people in the radio business (specifically Christian stations) ... and me ... (my husband works in this industry). A huge emphasis of the presentation was for everyone involved to treat their fan page as another "show." In radio, they have the morning show, the midday show, the drive show, etc. Similarly, we have our blog, our store(s), the challenges we host, the forums in which we're active, etc. These are our content channels.

To treat your fan page like a separate "show" or content channel means it must have it's own content - not just a repost of things being done elsewhere. It's OK to link up posts to your blog, new products and all that. But you just need more - and it needs to be on Facebook ONLY.
This is one of the biggest things I see going wrong on Facebook: not creating content JUST for your fans.

I have done this both ways and KNOW that it doesn't work to just do drive by advertising on your page. Not only do your customers see that you are not interested in them but Facebook flat out penalizes posts that are basically ads now in their algorithm. For a few months on the CUDigitals page, I did a little experiment and moved all the articles, tips, resources, etc onto the blog (the midweek reading series) and then just linked it up once a week.

Our page engagement absolutely plummeted. It was a ghost town. My posts weren't getting delivered and people were not engaging with the page at all.

Here is a screen shot of the aftermath. (Just keeping it real here!) Notice the DISMAL reach of 156 and people engaged: 13


One week after restarting to post helpful content in addition to just our new products and sales, our page engagement went up quite noticeably.



and the trend continued in the next weeks


 

As you can see, there is a dramatic rise in page engagement and reach.
 
What was the difference?

1. I began posting these types of items on the page – and ONLY on the page.

• Shareable graphics
• helpful tips
• links to hand-picked articles

2. I changed how how I handled and created content

• increase in number of posts
• posting seven days a week (the scheduling tool is your friend!!)
• no more Hootsuite (these are penalized in the algorithm)

 
Prior to making changes, on individual posts, I was seeing results on the level of "12 people reached" -- sometimes "2 people reached"

NOW, I am seeing things like THIS:



The CUDigitals page is small because it is a VERY niche market (far few designers that scrappers, although it doesn't always feel that way) but listen, that's a 30% reach rate on a single post! So the Facebook algorithm is something that can be worked with. You don't have to sit idly by, bemoaning the loss of post deliverability to your hard-won fans!

As a side note, you may be asking if this is just because of who follows our page (digital designers). It is not - I always had good engagement on my personal design page and the DigiScrapAddicts page by sharing content that was specific to that page as well. On my own page, it was things I liked from Pinterest, my personal scrapbook pages - even if they were NOT made with my own products, photography hints, and other similar things that kept my page engagement high.

This stuff works, designers! I have seen it personally on three different pages I have managed in this market. 

It will likely work for you, if you will simply change your mindset to look at your Fan Page as its OWN CHANNEL.

If you feel like you are too busy to mess with this, never fear! Follow the CUDigitals page and get content ideas every day - things you can share right to your own page, ideas to engage your audience and post interesting content (these are labeled "tribe building tips" on the post) plus resources to support your business. Oh - products too! Of course, we really appreciate it when you support our efforts to enhance your design business when you make CUDigitals the first place you visit when looking for commercial use digital scrapbooking tools and supplies.

Please feel free to share your comments and feedback about this article below!
top image credit: freedigitalphotos.net