Over the past week, I’ve been working on creating a Facebook landing page for my digital marketing services. Basically, a landing page is the first page that a potential fan of your brand or business sees on Facebook. Rather than directing them to a cluttered and confused wall, which may contain messages from others, the landing page allows you to explain who you are and encourage your visitors to click the ‘Like’ button. A recent post by Elizabeth Snyder outlines Why have a Facebook landing page? and links through to DesignMag‘s top examples.
Here’s mine. It’s not a top example, but for now it’s okay.
As I’ve discovered over the past week, it’s easy to spend hours obsessing over a landing page: wondering how to create it in the first place (I used the WordPress Facebook Tab Manager plug-in and then TabPress), worrying about how it’ll look for those using secure browsing, and making endless tweaks to the HTML code and CSS.
But at the end of the day, all the landing page needs to do is convince people to click that ‘Like’ button. After that, most of them will never see this landing page again. In fact, most of them will never return to your actual fanpage again, but instead, once they’ve liked you, they’ll start to see your content in their news feed.
So, where should Facebook marketers be spending most of their time? My suggestion is they spend it creating great content.
Facebook gives users a choice of seeing the ‘most recent’ news from their friends and liked pages, or the ‘top news’ from these sources. The ‘top news’ is based on Edge Rank, Facebook’s algorithm which ranks a post based the type of content, how a user’s interacted with content from this person in the past, and how long ago it was posted. Have low Edge Rank with the fans of your page, and chances are, even if they’ve liked you, they won’t see your content very often – if at all.
Therefore the secret to achieving a higher Edge Rank again seems to come back to content. In a recent review of the statistics, Socialbakers suggested that brands shouldn’t post on their pages more than 5-10 times a week. It’s important, therefore to make those posts count by creating content people that will engage with through leaving comments or sharing with their own Facebook friends.
This might include:
- uploading photos and asking for comments
- using the questions tool to run a poll
- using a status update to ask for feedback
- running a competition using a third party app
- posting useful links and inviting responses.
Basically, you’re looking for ideas which encourage people to interact, increasing your Edge Rank and the chances that your next post will continue to appear in that fan’s newsfeed.
Anecdotally it seems far more difficult to get a ‘like’ on Facebook, than a ‘follow’ on Twitter – so a clean landing page may be important for your organisation. However, as in any crowded social space, it’s easy for your Facebook posts to be missed or ignored. Spend your time creating engaging content, rather than endlessly tweaking your landing page, profile picture or the photos that appear at the top of your fan page, and it’s more likely that your brand will keep its place in your fans’ newsfeeds.
And as you converse with your fans, listen to their opinions and gather their feedback via the comments on your posts, it’s likely that having a fanpage will become more rewarding for you and your organisation as well.
If you found this article helpful at all, please consider visiting my landing page (or my wall for that matter) and clicking the like button. I like to be liked, and I hope to deliver you interesting and engaging content over the weeks and months ahead.
Hmm, never sure about landing pages. I think they are vital if you are running a page where you’ll allow other people to share on content on your wall, so preventing an immediate exposure to spam.
On the other hand, it does mean your expecting someone to actually go through to your wall whenever they visit, or make that extra click before they see your actual activity.
I guess it comes down to what you’d like to lead with, but certainly I think the question is closely related to the question of the differences between facebook and twitter. Engaging with a company on twitter is more casual and I guess people may be more willing to follow someone – whereas I don’t know anyone using facebook as a way of engaging in a business arrangement.
So if facebook is more personal and twitter more business like then it makes sense people would be far less likely to want to engage this way. It may even bring up important questions about the worth of facebook engagement for companies. After all twitter comments can be retweeted to the world and are picked up on by searches – facebook on the other hand may mean speaking to a much smaller audience with a smaller chance of exposure.
By the way – anyone actually use ‘top news’ rather than ‘most recent’ – I know in my experience most people don’t use top news at all, so maybe a bit of a red herring?
Oh and one more thing – least on my computer your ‘more services’ page is broken – the adverts on the page mean it cuts off the right hand side, might be better to link directly to an off-facebook page.
Thanks for your comment Jim. There are definitely differences between Twitter and Facebook, and my feeling is that Facebook allows you to interact more personally with perhaps a smaller number of fans. As far as I’m aware, ‘top news’ is the Facebook default – I know that I’m always having to click back to ‘most recent’ and Social Media Examiner’s recent Facebook piece says similar (http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/6-tips-to-increase-your-facebook-edgerank-and-exposure/).
Thanks for picking up the issue with my landing page as well. Because it’s using iframes, it was trying to load my website within that frame. Have added a target=”_blank” to my links there so they open in new windows.