I see plenty of companies starting Facebook Pages and not knowing what to do with them. I think the main problem is with the lack of information on how Facebook treats pages (and profiles but that is a different story).
You just need to look at stats of Facebook Pages for October 2015 to understand what is going on:
- Likes Growth: 0.20%
- Post Reach: 7.25%
- Engagement: 5.87%
Meaning, during October of 2015 for a page with 1000 likes, only 2 new likes were obtained, each post only was viewed by 73 persons and from that 73 only 4 engaged with the post (like, comment, click).
So, if you post once a week on a page with 1000 likes, you can expect 16 people to engage with your posts.
Obviously this is an average and you can (and should) get better results if you post great content for your audience. But don’t expect miracles. Getting a Facebook Page to be a good return on investment (ROI) is hard work.
I like to listen and learn with Gary Vaynerchuk. I don’t agree with some things he says but I think is a smart guy. He famously asks: What is the ROI of your mother? and he has got a good point. You cannot know the ROI of a social media presence upfront. You need to invest, try, adapt, learn, see what works and your ROI.
So, let’s be real: most Facebook Pages suck and nobody REALLY likes them. Your page probably sucks too. How many pages on Facebook do you engage with? Your users are not so different from you.
If you have a Facebook Page or are thinking of creating one, there are only two ways to go about it:
- do it casually (post once a week) and expect little from it
- do it properly, invest daily into creating great content for your audience and test what works best (as a rule of thumb: videos have a higher reach, photos a higher engagement)
I believe that anything in between will be a waste of time and the ROI will be negative.