How your Facebook page is like a cactus
Everyone always says you ‘can’t kill a cactus’, but in my experience, I haven’t found this to be 100% true. If you water a cactus too much, its roots will rot and it will fall out of its pot. If you don’t water it enough, it will shrivel up and die.
No, you haven’t accidentally switched over to a gardening blog, the above is also true of your Facebook business page.
It’s so easy when you get your new, shiny cactus (whoops I mean Facebook page) to go all out and post everything that pops into your head on the one day. You’re excited about this next step for your business and you just want to get into it. You put your heart and soul out there and you wait patiently for the love (likes) to come flooding in. But it isn’t always that easy.
As with anything worth doing, it takes time. Time to not only build your online community, but also time for your community to be interested in what you have to say. So how often should you water your Facebook page? The answer to that will be different for each business and the expectations of their community. Think about your own Facebook habits and how often you like to see posts from the businesses you follow. In my experience, the optimal number of posts per week is between 3 and 5. Any more than that and the roots will be rotting off your cactus.
I usually post twice a week and I think that’s enough for my audience.
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Nice one Colleen! It definitely does depend on your audience and it sounds like you’ve hit the mark. Thanks for reading!
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And the absolute best way to kill your cactus, I mean Facebook page, is to post a whole week’s worth of posts in 5 minutes!! Great blog! Thanks Bekki!!
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Hi Bekki! Great advice and blog. I’m certainly posting more than what you recommend and the reason for that is my posts are not seen by all of my Likers…according to the facebook tally of ‘people seeing this post’. Often one 10th of my overall Likers actually see my posts. What advice would you have in regards to number of posts and this particular dilemma. I feel that even though I post at least once a day, my Likers may only actually see one of those posts per week. I feel like it’s FB’s way of pressuring business owners to promote their posts with $
Would love to hear your thoughts?
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Hi Tamara,
Great question! My blog is definitely a guide and it’s important to find your groove with your audience. Usually your content will see around 8% organic reach (reach without paid advertising) and this can make it difficult for small businesses who don’t ‘pay to play’. You can reach above that with a couple of tricks including when you post, including an image (that fits perfectly to Facebook’s sizing) hashtagging, targeting and niching. Getting around Facebook’s Edgerank is an art and something I will blog about shortly.
Think about each of your posts like a virus. When you post something, your highly engaged ‘super users’ who always tend to like and comment will ‘catch it’ first and pass it on to their friends. If they don’t engage with your content, Facebook won’t push it out too much further and unfortunately Facebook’s algorithm will see your content die after about 24 hours if the engagement isn’t there.
You just have to make sure you look after your super users. You’re playing in their social space, where they come to touch base with their family and friends and you have to make sure you’re not filling their feeds by over-posting with content they don’t want to see. Use your ‘unlikes’ insights as a barometer and if you don’t see too many unlikes, you’re doing ok. Your content needs to feel like it’s coming from a ‘friend’ and native to their feed, it can’t feel like advertising or interrupt their content or in my experience, people will start to unlike.
My blog is definitely a guide and as a rule of thumb has worked for me, but each community is different and if you aren’t getting too many unlikes and your community tends to enjoy your content, you’re frequency is ok, but it’s always good to keep an eye on your insights.
Facebook fans can be quite fickle compared to other platforms like Instagram. Let me know if there is something that doesn’t make sense or you want to know more. – Bekki
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I have a similar experience – If I don’t post once a day I see a massive drop off in post reach
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