When it comes to marketing, Facebook isn’t exactly new. Nevertheless, the network doesn’t get tired of changing itself and thousands of pundits are publishing their tipps and advice on a day to day basis. Of course this leads to a lot of outdated or just “wrong” myths, that seem to stick around for a long time.
We’d like to debunk five of these Facebook marketing myths right now:
1. Users are visiting your page
Everyone that has taken a look at the Facebook insights knows: not many users come back to visit your site regularly. And the reason is pretty clear: It doesn’t provide any value. Of course it might happen from time to time that some superfans scroll through your posts or a being lured in by an ad. But regular organic visits just don’t happen.
Even Facebook itself seems to have noticed that and adjusted their new page layout accordingly: Apps have been moved to the left sidebar, where they are “buried” beneath a lot of other information. Also the possibility to highlight posts has been gone, too.
So the next time you’re thinking about the perfect design of your app icon or your header image, remember: almost all of your fans will only see these things exactly once when they visit and examine your page and hopefully click the Like button. After that all that matters is the News Feed.
2. Recurring posts are bad
Speaking of News Feed: Another “Facebook rule” seems to be, that it’s counterproductive to post a lot or that “recycling” post is considered uncool. That’s not right and can even have negative effects on your reach. Facebook itself advices you to just post more.
Of course you shouldn’t publish the same post five times a day, but spread it out over a couple of days and different times and you chances of raching more fans will increase dramatically.
3. Images work best
It’s a pretty old Facebook trick right now: Don’t share a link as a link post, but rather publish a nice image and put the link in the description. After all it grabs your fan’s attention which means more traffic, right? Wrong!
First, Facebook as of last year, Facebook supports link posts more than images. Secondly, thanks to the new open graph image sizes, link posts are as much attention grabbing as image posts and thirdly is the link (remember: the most important part) with these “image-link” posts only avaiable in the description, but not within the image (which in 99% is the first thing people tend to click on).
4. Keep it short
Every once in a while infographics, blog posts, intervies, case studies… they all tell you to keep it short and that the “perfect” lenght of a Facebook post is between 0 and round about 200 characters.
And that’s not wrong per se if you want to drive the conversation and traffic away from your Facebook posts. As always: What matters is what you want to achieve with that post?!
If you want to keep the conversation on Facebook, a longer, informative, even provocative text (maybe with some bulletpoints) makes more sense. The “Facebook Queen” herselfs, Mari Smith, likes to publish long texts (like this 500 words behemoth), which doesn’t seem to hurt her Engagement.
Of course it’s crucial that your post starts exciting and engaging (to make people click “See more”) and keeps on being informative and providing value. After all: If your fans like reading your blog posts (which requires them to leave Facebook) why wouldn’t they love to get and discuss the most important information right on Facebook without the additional click?!
5. Virality is crucial
That thought is more popular than you might think: “Our content has to go viral – Hundreds of thousands of people have to share, like and comment it”. Not only is that near to impossible (In Germany, 2013 only 0,003% of all posts went viral, meaning they reached more people than the page had fans at the time), but it’s also not necessary. As always it depends on your companie’s goals and what you want to achieve with your Facebook posts.
A viral hit rarely provides long lasting success. Think about it: Even if you gain 200,000 fans with such a post, you somehow have to keep these fans entertained and engaged. No social media team can possibly be prepared for such a task… After all you’ll end up less productive as ever.
Do you prefer facts over myths? Then try Fanpage Karma for free now!
