Ty Rothstein
Your Facebook page has the power to make or break your business. With the amount of time and content people take in while staring at their feeds, taking advantage of people’s tastes and attention span is your top priority. As hard as you are trying to do that, you might not even know that you are making common Facebook mistakes that’ll lead to a Facebook page that doesn’t help you sell or engage.
The current organic reach on Facebook is hovering at just above 2%! That is not great news, but it’s not the end of the world either. How do you get to more people?
One way is boosting posts (which costs money). The other way is creating a thriving Facebook page. To create a thriving Facebook page you first must stop making the following common Facebook mistakes and realign your page with the best practices known to mankind. Open up your Facebook page, and get ready to complete a quick facelift to it.
Facebook Mistake #1: Too Much Text
We all know that our attention spans are short. In fact it has been proven that our attention span is shorter than that of a goldfish!
Sometimes a business may find a need to explain or detail something on their Facebook page by using text. Updates are great. Tutorials are fantastic. Giving news updates to followers is a great move. However, you have to keep in mind short attention spans when doing so.
Take this post for example. It’s a great brand, but take a look at how much text they used!
This post could have created more engagement with the audience, had it been created with a little less text. The post received 37 likes and only five likes.
The Solution:
You know the saying, “less is more”, well when it comes to using text in Facebook posts that tends to be true more often than not. What can you do? Use different types of images and video that can get across the message with fewer words. In fact, it’s been shown that posts with 80 characters or less in length have 27% higher engagement rates.
Facebook Mistake #2: Not Using Optimized Images
The first rule of posting images on Facebook: make sure they are the right size! Images that are not optimized for Facebook can reflect a few negative vibes to your followers: a lack of professionalism and detail. Those types of vibes do not cause your followers to stop and interact with you.
Would you like, comment, or share this? Probably not.
In addition, images that are not optimized are less likely to get through Facebook’s filter. Facebook filters the feed that each and every one of us see, in hopes of keeping us on Facebook as long as possible. Images that are not optimized don’t fit that mold.
“Every time someone visits News Feed there are on average 1,500 potential stories from friends, people they follow and Pages for them to see, and most people don’t have enough time to see them all.” – Lars Backstrom of Facebook
The Solution:
It’s simple, use the right sizes. If you need help sizing the images try using Pablo by Buffer, Canva, PicMonkey, or Picresize.
- Cover pictures: 851 x 315 pixels (minimum size: 399 x 150 pixels)
- Profile pictures: 180 x 180 pixels (shown as 160 x160)
- Post pictures: 1,200 x 630 pixels (maximum width in Facebook feed:470 pixels, maximum width in pages: 504 pixels)
Facebook Mistake #3: No Watermarks
You have worked hard to create an image or set of images to use in a new marketing campaign. You have optimized all the images to be the right size for each social network, but alas there is still one problem: the second someone shares it and then it gets shared again and goes viral no one will know who created it.
Take a look at that image. You know it relates to poverty and malnutrition, but you have no idea who stands behind it. That’s a shame and a growth stunt – you don’t want that!
The Solution:
Jack Dorsey, CEO of both Twitter and Square said,”Make every detail perfect, and limit the number of details to perfect”, and he is 100% correct. The connection to watermarks is simple: you’ve spent time planning and then creating the images, but without adding a watermark you’re missing a small, yet crucial detail. See the watermark?
Facebook Mistake #4: Ignoring Complaints (or Giving Below-Average Support)
This my friends may be the biggest mistake of them all, because of the damage that it can cause to your brand. I found this a while back on the Help Scout Blog and knew I had to share this with you. Astonishing, no?
Customer support, experience, or success (however you call it) is the base to your business. If your customer support is just average, you’re in for an uphill battle. This is just one of dozens of other unanswered comments on the same page.
The Solution:
You don’t need to move mountains – just guide your customers on the right path. You can choose to give the customer a solution on the spot, or share with them your email address. Personally, transparency is number one in my book, so I like to see a solution given on the spot. After all, what’s better: exceeding, meeting, or not meeting customer expectations? You know the answer.
Check out our post: 5 Tips to Improve Your Customer Service on Facebook
Facebook Mistake #5: Sharing One Type of Content
Do you eat the same thing everyday? Imagine having the same breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a month. Not something fun to think about. Now imagine, your favorite brand started sharing the exact same thing every day. The same image (or a similar version), with the same general text. You’d get bored of that pretty quickly, no?
One of the mistakes that many Facebook Page managers make is thinking that they can just share blog posts or images. In reality, a successful page has variety of different content.
The Solution:
Mix and match. Like posting too much and using too much text, the solution that will lead to more interactions will be created after you’ve tested what followers love, like, and hate. Try using GIFs, images with and without text, relevant articles, videos, infographics, tutorials, behind the scenes stories, discuss future collections, and ask followers for their opinions!
Notice that the images vary from post to post, and they also make sure to use video to interact with their followers (one video got 50+ likes and the other recent video got 80+ likes)!
Facebook Mistake #6: Posting Too Often
We all want to get in front of as many of our fans as possible. That being said, there is a right and wrong way of getting in front of a larger audience. Posting too much can derail your path to getting in front of more fans and actually turn away followers that have had enough.
Instead of trying to boost the reach of a certain post by making it more engaging, many online professionals try to post more often in hopes of reaching more people altogether. That though, is not the solution. Facebook knows how to treat someone that behaves well and how to discipline someone that isn’t behaving.
The Solution:
Quality beats quantity when it comes to engaging your community on social media. The general rule of thumb is to post at most twice a day to Facebook.
These are the results from a HubSpot study.
If you’ve got more than 10,000 followers then posting twice a day is the right move as it can lead to an increase in the number of clicks per post. On the other end of the spectrum, pages with fewer than 10,000 followers received fewer clicks per post when they increased the quantity of posts: companies with less than 10,000 followers that post more than 60 times a month receive 60% fewer clicks per post than those companies that post five or fewer times a month.
Facebook Mistake #7: Cover Images That Lack Branding
Your cover image is meant to make you stand out. By looking at the image visitors should know what brand it is and what it does – regardless of where they stumble across the image (on the page or in a Google image search).
Do you know who this represents?
What about this one?
Both are huge brands, making a small mistake that has a big cost. They’re both generic images that could be used by another thousand or so Facebook pages.
Before a visitor sees any of your posts, they first see your profile and cover images. With the size that Facebook offers for your cover image being more than enough, it would be a shame not to capitalize on the opportunity to make a lasting first impression.
The Solution:
What does your brand represent? Answer that question and then put the words into an image. Unlike the above cover images, with both of these you know exactly what you are looking at.
Facebook Mistake #8: Not Completing the “About” Information
The internet is a very dense marketplace. Everyone is selling something. Basically, the internet is one giant shopping mall. When you are trying to trying to convert interactions into sales one of the ingredients that’ll increase the likelihood of an engaged follower turning into a purchaser is by creating trust.
You don’t create trust when you don’t fill out all the information that Facebook requests. Are you hurting the level of trust? Not for sure, but if you are given a way to increase the level of trust you should take it. Don’t forget the small details.
The Solution:
Filling out the information about your business can only help you and put you on the right trajectory to creating a trusted brand. Don’t give people an excuse not to buy from you. See in this example, how they filled in all the information, including a long description that differs from the shorter one and they added the contact email twice.
Facebook Mistake #9: Sales Pitches 24/7
There is no doubt about it: we all want our Facebook marketing efforts to lead to an increase in sales. There are certain strategies that can lead to an increase in sales. There are also strategies that can decrease sales and also make your Facebook page less attractive.
People enjoy making purchases online, and Facebook is no different. However, just sharing a picture of a product and stating that it is available for $ 15.99 is not the way to increase your sales. If you make your Facebook page followers feel as if they’ve just walked into a retail store with pushy sales people, sales won’t improve.
The Solution:
The best converting Facebook advertisements have one thing in common: they don’t sell the product, rather they share a story or the benefits that come with using the product. One of the best practices for increasing sales via your Facebook page includes using a Facebook shop with marketing campaigns, such as StoreYa’s Group Deal or Scratch & Win which give followers the social shopping experience they are looking for.
Here’s a great example. They don’t use a lot of text, but the text used matches perfectly with the image. They also added a reminder about a free product, and shared the link to the pictured product. This post gets two things right, it helps them sell and engages their followers.
Now that you know what to avoid, and how to correct the problems, take a look at your Facebook page. Are you practicing any of these deadly Facebook mistakes? If so, see how the suggested solutions can be implemented to make sure your Facebook page becomes the coolest place on the block!
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