How To: Grow Your Facebook Audience
You know the story, I’m a photographer. My friends and family say my photos are beautiful, but every time I post them on Facebook hardly anyone sees them.
I’ll help you change that… Grab your coffee, your photos and your Facebook device and let’s get you some “reach”.
Mike and I love our photography. We’ve been taking photos for many years, each with our own Facebook accounts, with a few friends following us.
Finally, after years of discussing it, we launched Frame Focus Foto. We invited all our friends to like our page, and we had 91 likes. Yay!
Time for our first post. It reached 62 people, with 3 likes. Excitement gone! It was time to do my research…
Go Google!
This is what I learnt.
Determine your Strategy. Set your Goals
Any social media strategy should have clear goals in mind. For me, it’s to:
- Grow our brand
- Become better known
- Generate an income in the future
For today’s blog I am focussing on Facebook “reach”. In other words, I want to get my photos and my brand name in front of as many eyes as often as possible, without paying Facebook for advertising.
Quality vs Quantity
Make sure you are posting quality content. It doesn’t have to be a “perfect” image taken with a professional camera, but it should be a proficient, beautiful image that defines you and your brand.
The saying “less is more” is not necessarily correct. The strangest of images tend to go viral these days. In general, a post’s momentum dies within 2-3 hours, so avoid multiple posts within this period. But only posting once or twice a week will not give you brand awareness.
Try to post when your audience is awake, so it will be fresh in their feed. As a new page, my Facebook campaign is for reach, so we post twice a day, once when our audience in Hong Kong is awake and another (different post and image) when our audience in Europe is awake, 7 days a week.
7 days a week! That means we are busy posting every day on Facebook. No! Use Facebook tools like Creator Studio. This allows us to work on our posts for an entire week and schedule them all on one day. I will write further blogs about the tools I use.
Be active on Facebook
For me, this is one of the most important aspects of “organic reach”. I join different Facebook groups, using my personal account and then share my pages posts to these groups.
Using this method, I shared my post 6 times and got 5 686 views.
That’s a lot more than just the followers that like my page.
Sharing your image posts every day will start increasing your brand awareness. Provide quality content that people want to see. They will start following you.
It’s not that simple though, you need to consider the following when you share your posts:
Is the content appropriate to the group? For example, don’t post pictures of your family watching Netflix on a travel group.
What are the admin rules of the group? Some groups don’t allow self-promoting or commercial posts. I have had a post denied because the group doesn’t allow the promoting your own page. Decide what is important to you. To have your photos seen or building brand awareness.
Don’t share your posts to groups in quick succession. Facebook views sharing of posts at a high rate as spam. The post is then blocked. Reading the Facebook rules, it only mentions don’t share at high frequency. I find sharing my post to one or two pages every few minutes is fine.
Think outside the box when you share your post to groups. For example, a photo I took with my Canon SX40 in the Kruger Park of a cheetah, I shared to the following groups:
- Advertise your page for free (327 700 members)
- Kruger sightings (47 200 members)
- Travel bucket list (606 00 members)
- Travel inspiration (82 500 members)
- Canon camera users (88 300 members)
- Wild cats (48 400 members)
- Photography (95 000 members)
I hope this blog has given you some inspiration and will help you promote your photos and brand awareness.
Follow us at @FrameFocusFoto (www.facebook.com/FrameFocusFoto) and keep a look out for my next blog in this series.
Stay authentic and no matter what, have fun!