By: Maria Harrison

This is part I in a multi-part summer series.

It’s sizzling hot outside; and social media is as hot as ever. As folks across the U.S. vacation, the rest of us are all logging into Facebook to keep up with our friends and families summer travels, kiddie camp happenings, summer concerts, blockbusters and more. This means a flood of posts in your Facebook News Feed. A recent report by comscore shows that the majority of time users spend on Facebook is looking at their News Feed.

Other studies have shown that popular brands such as Starbucks and Southwest Airlines saw 40 to 151 times more impressions in the news feed than on their Facebook Pages; this is driven by several factors, one primary cause is that the News Feed is your default “home page”; another cause is the re-shares of News Feed posts by a Page’s “likes”.

What does this mean for you? As a company, you need to be focused on how to get your status updates read in the News Feed.

Here are 6 sizzling summer tips for getting your Facebook page status updates noticed in the News Feed now and throughout the year:

1. Use Photos – Even though people are “reading” their News Feeds, we all know a picture is worth a thousand words… so use them! Posting pictures in your News Feed is more likely to get your post noticed.

2. Use Videos – If a picture is worth a thousand words, maybe a video is worth a million? Posting videos in your status updates potentially drives longer engagement with your brand. Post the video with an enticing headline that has a clear call-to-action (CTA) to click on the video and watch it for more information, exciting details on an offer, or educational information. Indicate how long the video is (e.g. short, 30 seconds, etc.), so folks know they won’t be pulled into a 20-minute video that they don’t have time to watch.

3. Post Regularly – Clients often ask us how often they should be posting updates on Facebook. There is no one-size-fits-all answer; it really depends on your business, your target audience, and what you’re posting. One post per day is probably safe, more may be warranted. It’s important to know that your posts get pushed down throughout the day so if you’re posting in the morning, you might want to post again in the afternoon to give your post a better chance of being seen. Posting too often will risk users “unliking” your page. Monitor “unlike” activity through Facebook Stats. If you notice a higher number of “unlikes” on a day where you had multiple posts, reducing posts may be the key.

4. Be Relevant – It’s easy to use a “set it and forget it” approach to social media by scheduling updates through a posting tool (e.g. HootSuite). While we love posting tools to manage social media, you still have to be vigilant about current happenings and news. If something’s happening that is related to your business, you might need to consider doing real-time ad hoc posts on occasion. You also need to consider how many people within your organization or agency have access to post on your Facebook Page. If multiple people can post for you, you may want to create a business rule that says no one can post for at least X number of minutes or hours after your primary post of the day. This insures that your primary post is front and center.

5. Ask a Question – Facebook’s recent release of their “Question” functionality allows you to ask a question of users. This is a great way to create engagement with your post. The fact that you answered the question will also show up in their News Feed, which will help to make it viral for you as well (see tip 6 below for more on making posts go viral). You can opt to use the Question functionality or you can simply allow people to answer a Question in “Comment” form. Here are two examples below:

Using Question Functionality:

Using Standard Post Functionality:

Make it Viral – One of the great promises of social media, and specifically Facebook, is that you can tap into the friends of your “likes”. Make your posts exciting enough that your “likes” will want to share it with their friends and tell them to do it. Clients often ask us why their posts are not being shared on Facebook and we often see that their posts are a) bland and b) don’t tell the reader to share it. People need to be told what to do… so tell them!

Here’s an example of a post that the company could have easily told me to Share with my friends. They had the room to do it in their Status Update but they didn’t tell me to do it (full disclosure, we are not Annie’s social media agency but we would love to be! We’re huge fans of their products for our kiddies!)

So, I could easily have made this a list of 30 tips, but I’ve got you off to a great start at insuring your posts get noticed in the News Feed and more than that, get Shared!

Stay tuned for Part II in our Sizzling Summer Social Media Series, You’re Tweeting…chirp chirp – Why Twitter is Important to Your Business

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