Facebook Part 3: Content Strategy

Now that you’ve committed to building a community through Facebook and understood some of the basics, you may be wondering what you should post, how often, and how a relatively small brand without a big creative staff will come up with creative content. Not to fear, there are many sources of good content around you.

First of all, how often? A few years ago companies and brands would post all the time, because the more they did the more fans they would reach. In today’s pay to play Facebook model, no matter how often you post it’s unlikely that you will reach a significant chunk of your audience. Most posts are lucky to reach the newsfeeds of 3% of your fans. So there is no benefit to frequent posting, and too often is both hard to keep up with. So my recommendation is posting 2-3 times a week. Be consistent but natural…don’t post at the same day and time of every week. And if something big happens (let’s say your restaurant wins a big award or your brand gains authorization in a big new retailer), don’t sit on that news just because you posted yesterday. Staying natural means expressing your genuine excitement when something good happens.

What to post? When it comes to Facebook and Instagram, I suggest that content should be divided into thirds:

1/3 – Product/commercial posts. This is stuff about your product and brand. Advertising or publicizing your product, offering discounts, communicating features and benefits. These posts are like ads, even if they take a friendly or non-commercial tone. Make sure that you use good imagery of your product, and mix it up. Sometimes show the product in its package, sometimes in a real application (people enjoying the food or drink in a restaurant, a shirt on a person), and sometimes in even more creative ways.

1/3 – Posts that relate to your product or company’s mission, but don’t advocate a commercial call to action. Examples of this type of content would be an article about mindfulness for a yoga related product, or a story about the health benefits of avoiding gmos if your products are non-gmo.  You can easily find stories and articles of this type, just make sure you have permission to re-post them.

1/3 – Fun posts. Holidays, the occasional meme, celebrating those quirky “holidays” that relate to your brand (National Pepperoni Pizza Day, for example).

These are general guidelines, you don’t have to rigidly adhere to them. Just shoot for a balanced content strategy over time.

So last but not least, how do you produce all this good content? It’s not necessarily easy, but there’s opportunity all around you:

• Whenever you go to a trade show, do a product demo, or have any other interaction with a customer, take pictures and video and post them. It’s ok if they don’t look professionally done as long as they’re authentic.
• When you take product photography, leverage those sessions for social media content. Carve out a little time at the end and put together some seasonal shots.
• If you have a product designer on your team, ask him or her to edit pictures or create infographics.
• Profile members of the team, and post them every so often (once or twice a month). Your fans will enjoy a peek under the company’s hood.
• Repost relevant blogs and articles from authors who are relevant in your space. They might even return the favor and mention your company.

A few other tips:

• Video is best, images are good, keep words concise – general rules to live by, and deviate from when necessary
• Avoid controversial topics unless they’re truly relevant, and then take time to think through how to address them
• Ask users for their content when possible, incorporate contents when necessary

Enough of my thoughts, what’s working for you? Any tips to share?

10/12/17