Facebook | Forum « Keep It or Delete It???

Keep It or Delete It??? (8 posts)

Richard Bishop said
4 months, 2 weeks ago:
     Facebook has never really been a great tool for us. Sure we have a few great promos going on FB and we post regularly and an assortment of types of content that is relevant to our business and industry.
     We have tried hundreds of “Secrets” according to the experts and still are not yielding the results we are looking for.
     Now I guess I should tell you what results we want from our Facebook page. For one What I feel is the most important is engagement from our fans/likers. I feel like a good quantity of quality engagement would add to our credibility. As far as how many fans/likers we have I really don’t care. I know… I know… Your thinking that’s crazy. Maybe but here is the way I look at it. Even if I had a million fans/likers does it really matter if they are not actively engaging with us?
     And now this past summer when Facebooks stocks went through the floor they went wild looking for ways to recover their losses and as a result we now have “Promoted Posts”. Yippee…Not They have now made it even harder for us to gain the engagement we are looking for by limiting the amount of our fans that actually see the posts we make on our pages. That is unless of course your willing to pay as much as $500 per post whice I certainly am not since Facebook has never been a source of revenues for us.
    In closing I ask this. Is our Facebook Fan Page worth keeping or should we delete it and abandon Facebook all together, since we now have Google + which seems to make up where Facebook was lacking for us for some reason. And if you have an idea that you think we have not tried outside of promoted posts by all means share.
- Chef Ricky
@ccateringc | # | Top
Russell Allert said
4 months, 2 weeks ago:
@ccateringc Hey Richard
I am not going to advise you whether you should delete your FB account or not. What I would tell you is you need to be where your customers are.
If you are not getting engagement on FB, but you are on G+ then move to G+. It really is that simple.
It’s all about the return on the effort being put in. If you feel that all that time and effort isn’t generating you the results you were after, then feel free to try something else, and if that something else is G+, then go for it.
You could always transition from one to the other over time, rather than shutting down Facebook altogether immediately.
I do believe there are strategies that you can employ that still make Facebook a viable network. One example of this is to use it to build your email list. Attract people to your FB page, capture their email, and then move on – that way it doesn’t really matter if they see your FB posts on an on-going basis.
Russ
@russellallert | # | Top
Wade Harman said
4 months, 2 weeks ago:
I know that paying to promote a post seems ridiculous. But if people aren’t talking about your page, then it does matter. I recently did some research for a blog post I was writing called Improve Your Social Presence on Facebook about the post promotion for fan pages.
There are two kinds of fan page promotion for posts that you can do.
1. $5 promoted posts-these are supposed to reach “up to” 5k people
2. $10 promoted posts-these are supposed to reach “up to” 11k people
After a series of promotion that I did I found that the $5 promotion reached just as many people as the $10 promotion did. So if you’re going to do that type of promotion, don’t waste your money on the $10 one.
For me, the $5 post averaged out to reach about 4,000 people. The $10 post reached only 4,500-5,000 people. So Facebook definitely needs to fix something there.
Can you get more visibility with post promotion? Yes. Facebook is a top traffic driver for my site and if you can get people talking about it, it will build your fan page integrity. Paying for promoted posts is the fastest way to get people talking about your page.
Hope that helps.
@wade-harman | # | Top
Richard Bishop said
4 months, 2 weeks ago:
@Russellallert
Thank you for the honesty and the feedback. But now I have 2 questions for you. The first of which is how would I issue and handle transitioning off Facebook to say as an example Google +? And secondly, how would I go about using FB to build my email list? I guess I am not sure how to do that.
- Chef Ricky
@ccateringc | # | Top
Richard Bishop said
4 months, 2 weeks ago:
@wade-harman
Yeah see I dont know where you got 5 and 10 dollars for promoted posts. The last time I looked into promoting a post it was going to cost me more than $500 for a single post.
I have more than 1600 fans on facebook and very few are talking about it even though we post religiously every day all content thats relavent to our business and industry. We even go so far as to offer things like our Facebook rewards, details of this offer/program can be found at http://classycateringcreations.com/services/freebies/facebook-rewards We went one step further to encourage engagement and created our FREE For All Friday events that take place every week on our facebook and we struggle to get participation for that as well and I dont understand why but you can get details for that event at http://classycateringcreations.com/services/freebies/free-for-all-friday
Our posts range from famous food and cooking quotes to today in food history posts that talk about a historical food or cooking event. We post a recipe of the week every week, we post Food trivia every week and still not much in the way of results.
So I ask how do you get people to talk about you?
- Chef Ricky
@ccateringc | # | Top
Russell Allert said
4 months, 2 weeks ago:
@ccateringc Well, you could always hire my services for both, Richard.
Transitioning is always difficult. I would bet that most of those who like your Facebook page would not be on G+ so telling them about your new G+ page would do little (although I would still do it).
It is difficult to say what I would do until I had a good look at your business and pages, but the first thing to do is to build up your G+ page. You will need to get this going first and then start moving people over.
As for using FB as an email capture strategy. You simply set up an email subscription form on your Facebook page, using a company like ShortStack and then drive people to that page-app.
You can do this via promotions, organic traffic, ads or any other means you can think of. Just make sure you aren’t tricking people to signing up. Another way is to give something very cool away for free if someone signs up. Or offer a great discount, depending on your business.
Hope that helps.
Russ
@russellallert | # | Top
Mitch Rezman said
4 months, 2 weeks ago:
@Richard Bishop You can’t transition from one SM platform to another, that’s not how it works – Unless you’re where your customers are which is FB and G+ and Pinterest and ad nauseum….you’re only capturing a sliver.
Just a couple of thoughts – getting likes is easy and economical but engagement?I’m no expert and there are no secrets but if you’re a caterer why aren’t you posting giant hi res images of your sizzling culinary creations, table settings and crying brides? You’re posting about camping food (Jiffy & Spam) while you’re trying to attract people to $30 place settings What exactly is your message? I’d ask the next events photographer & videographer to get you some shots. My guess is what you pay them will get you more engagement per dollar spent than promoted posts. I’d cruise Pinterest for shares too
@mitch-rezman | # | Top
Kristy C. Cartier said
4 months, 2 weeks ago:
@ccateringc My association doesn’t have a huge following or engagement on Facebook. Still I keep at it. Twitter is our main social media platform (probably because I’m good at it!). We use FB, LinkedIn and Pinterest for support. Our main goal is to drive membership and conference registrations.
I like @mitch-rezman‘s suggestion about tasty food photos. Just remember that Facebook has seemed to play down the photo/video posts vs. all-text so might have to get into paying for them to be seen as @wade-harman mentioned.
I would also suggest that you begin commenting on other’s pages. Provide tips on how to replicate an inexpensive version of your dishes at home or how to keep food hot (think Thanksgiving, SuperBowl, etc.).
Check out my friend’s Simply Desserts page for ideas. Also look at Earthegy’s page. These two ladies mix it up between professional and personal. Their content is why I follow. I love looking at the jewelry and fantastic cakes/foods!
Good luck!
@kc_kreative | # | Top