How to Monitor Facebook Notifications to Skyrocket Engagement!
One thing I see more often than not, with ALL of my clients, is the lack of understanding for just how important engaging on Facebook really is to your overall strategy. It is not a place to vomit your posts and content and leave. You have to take time and really speak to your audience. It’s a connection point.
Social Marketing is a conversation.
This is what is usually missing from the most sound social marketing strategies. Companies will often tell you that you need to engage, but they often have no real good way to tell you HOW to catch EVERYTHING. Because it is HARD! Keeping up with 2-3 networks with comments, likes, loves, reactions, repins, clicks, and… well you get the point. Overwhelming isn’t it?
So thats the point of this blog. To teach you my lesser know strategies of making sure you never miss a beat on social media and so that you never feel like you are overworked either. Let’s face it, social media is something we do out of necessity and you have a real company to run. We are not going to add a whole other job on you tour plate for the fun of it. So, here are my secrets…
Helpful Notifications To Watch on Facebook
The first thing to know about notifications is that once you get an audience built up, there will be a lot of them. When you click the notification tabs on your admin bar as pictured above it is going to take you to a window where you will be shown lots of different things, one of which will be a side bar that looks like the one on the right.
When I look at my pages (to monitor the like count, the number of comments, and shares) I always take time to look through each of the sections systematically 2 times a day to make sure that I am watching for new activity.
Reacting to Reactions on Facebook
The “Likes” will give you a basic indication of what content is doing well and which content did not perform on your page. Sometimes, you will get new fans that scroll through your wall and like lots of posts at once so that activity will show you what new fans are interested in. That being said, your likes are just part of a whole and it is not the goal of all your posts JUST to get reactions. We want complete audience engagement. This is part of the reason that Facebook has moved to using what they call reactions (like, love, haha, wow, sad, and angry), which I am sure you have all seen.
These reactions are simply a gage and should ideally be evaluated in a monthly reporting setting for the best interpretation. I do not actually look at these daily. These do not need to be “monitored” like the other things here on the notifications. Sometimes if there is tons of activity that is really buzzing around a post this will help me determine if this should be reposted at a later date in a different time slot (yes, this IS acceptable since on average only 20% of your audience is seeing a post each time you send it out.) My rule of thumb personally is not to send it more than twice in a month if it is doing really well this varies on the number of times day you post however. More posts per day = the more times you can share andre share your popular content.
When I started off on Facebook marketing I began with 2 posts a day and worked my way up to about 4-5 posts a day. I use Buffer for my social media scheduling and planning which mad it really easy to curate the number of shares of others content I needed because of their handy extension. Remember it’s all about balance (80 % others content 20% your content) That means, for every 10 posts only 2 of those should be YOUR promotional type content!
Create Engagement with Comment Replies
The next thing I do when monitoring my page is to take the time to read all the new comments on my posts. I always try and reply to everything. Sometimes the comment only calls for a reaction on that specific thread, sometimes it calls for a comment back to answer a question or statement. Sometimes it’s just a thanks for looking type comment, but it goes a long way to helping social media actually be social.
This is one personal area of struggle for me. I love people, but in my 10 years of working in social media marketing at a marketing firm, I could see that I was jaded. I was constantly expecting the bad of people and never seeing the good I them anymore. Social media has helped me regain some of that confidence since doing it on my own terms. When you post for other people your hands get tied. When you reply for yourself there is more freedom and excitement. This is seriously one thing I would NEVER outsource. My relationship with my fans and customers is way too valuable.
What happens when you get negative comments?
REPLY… most of the time people are not sending you negative feed back for nothing. There was a popular weight loss app that took a stance slamming another diet protocol in one of their ads. Surprisingly the outcry on social media went virtually unnoticed by them (or more accurately their marketing firm -which is why I take issue with large corporate monsters like that… but that’s a whole other blog post). This company had a valuable lesson to learn from their target audience about what was working and what wasn’t. Instead they ignored all the negative comments (and positive ones too) and continued the ad for an obstinate amount of time. I am planning to write a full article on this soon so you can all see their folly and make better choices!
Moral of the story, read the comments and don’t get mad at the haters, let them make you better. That’s right…
Find the truth in each criticism and be better! GROW!
Direct Messages and Notifications on Facebook
One of my best practical tips for this section is use the inbox tab. Mine always stays at ZERO. Why? Because, then I know for sure when something has been replied to. I check it off and go on about my business.
The best part… you can now integrate your Instagram comments and loves in this section as well! yay for multi tasking!
Also another hack is make sure you have the Facebook pages app installed on your smart phone, it is a lifesaver. Check your page by the pool, sipping margaritas, or waiting in line for the ski lift! Pick your poison… ????
Shares are Social Cred
I know it is silly, but you know how you need street cred to be the toughest kid on the block? Well you need social cred to have the toughest Facebook posts on the block. The best thing I do when I make time for monitoring is take the time to go through all the shares from my page and like and even comment on them individually. Now, keep in mind that if your post is shared over 20 or 30 times this can get time consuming so it is not a requirement just a nice way of letting fans know you are thankful for their help in sharing their confidence in you!
As your business grows and you are getting hundreds or thousands of shares engaging with all of them may be unrealistic, so do what feels authentic to your brand. Just a side note, this is also a good way to see what people are saying about you or your products. It can give you a heads up as to what they are most interested in.
For example, one time I had someone share a quote about a beach home that I was promoting for a client and he said that when he stayed with my client he had a terrible time and the house was horrible. I called my client and asked them about it and they had no idea he had issues with the home. They called and worked it out with him, compensating for his frustrations and he reposted a few days later saying how they had been so impressed with the way we reached out because of something posted on social media that he would likely be staying with the company again. So the moral of the story is to not fear the negative feed back that will come at some time or another. Embrace the feed back and do the best that you can do and ignore all the rest!
If you have not been following along on my blog, be sure to check The Best Ways to Automate Facebook Messages where I talk about how to reply to direct messages on Facebook and how to set up automatic replies to direct messages on your Facebook page! (HUGE time saver)
