5 Surprising Facts About Facebook for Brands

With the recent brouhaha about Facebook pages having lower reach, marketers are doing all they can to ensure they always have a post live in the newsfeed so they’re reaching as many fans as possible.

Facebook analytics provider PageLever has provided Digiday with data to help marketers to make the best of their Facebook marketing. Some of the data is rather surprising, but the implications are simple: Content is king on Facebook. Your content could make or break you.

Your Facebook fans are 60 times more likely to hide all status updates from your page than to actually unfan you.
That means that it’s now that much harder to ensure you have an active audience on Facebook. Content is king, meaning it’s time to sit down and really think about what you’re doing on Facebook and whether it’s relevant to your audience and also something that’s unique.

SEO isn’t that important for Facebook pages.
According to PageLever, LinkedIn drives more traffic to Facebook pages than Google and Bing combined. Digiday recently wrote an article about LinkedIn being the “forgotten social network.” Let’s face it, LinkedIn isn’t exactly sexy, but that does not mean it isn’t important. Marketers need to figure out what their LinkedIn strategy is and how they can use the platform to drive awareness of their other social media presence.

Facebook recently made it so spam reports negatively affect the reach of your posts significantly more than they used to.
Be careful not to post anything that might get marked as spam. The hard sell won’t work on Facebook. Everyone knows this, but now it’s truer than ever. Consumers that feel like you are spamming them now have the power to ruin you as a brand, so make sure your Facebook posts aren’t pissing people off to the point where they’re overkill.

Most Facebook posts die within 3-5 hours.
This is both good and bad. If you’re post isn’t doing well, don’t worry too much about it, because it’ll be dead soon anyway. Learn from it, and move on. On the other hand, you’ve only got a short window of time for people to engage, so make sure that the content is right: relevant, entertaining and unique.

If you’re paying to sponsor stories, you’ll get more viral views by sponsoring stories right away.
Waiting a couple of days will lower your chances of “going viral” because of the way Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm works. Time is of the essence on Facebook. You need to think fast. If you see a post is doing well, you need to be ready to amplify it on the spot with Facebook Ads. Waiting could make it a missed opportunity.

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