Hello, my name is Jayne Corso and I am the community manager for American Evaluation Association and the voice behind the AEA Facebook page.
Facebook can be a great tool for creating a community and promoting your organization to a larger social audience. However, with organic reach dropping on Facebook, resulting with the only 6 percent of your fan base seeing your content, it’s difficult to reach your community without paying for it. I have compiled a few tips that will help increase that reach percentage without having to spend additional dollars.
Hot Tip: Solve a problem
Most people use the Internet to be entertained or to solve a problem. Evaluators use resources every day to solve problems, so share those solutions with your community. And if you can add a little bit of humor, go for it! Quick 1-2 sentence postings work best for this social channel.
Hot Tip: Experiment! Play with posting types and times
Keep your community on their toes. Post a variety of post types, such as evaluation news, tips and tricks, or fun facts. You can also interject trending hashtags such as #tbt (throw back Thursday) or #FunFactFriday, to increase the reach of your post.
Try different posting times. See what kind of engagement you can get by posting at 7:30 a.m. or 8:00 p.m. Look outside of typical business hours to see if you can find optimal engagement times.
Include some gaps in your posting. Typically we are told to post to social media channels every day, but see what happens if you leave a two day or three day gap, your community does not necessarily want to see content every day.
Identify trends that your community is interested in. If you see that a lot of your data visualization posts do well, optimize accordingly. This increases relevance and in turn engagement.
Hot Tip: Engage with other evaluation communities on Facebook
Share stories, photos, and posts from other evaluators or evaluation businesses on Facebook. This creates diversity in your postings and connects you to the online evaluation community, where you can interact and meet new evaluators.
Tag other organizations within your post! If you are referencing an organization, check to see if they have a Facebook page. If they do, tag them in your post by including @[organization name]. This will allow your content to have a link to the organization’s page which will help create more visibility in the news feed of the fans who have liked the tagged pages.
Don’t leave Facebook just because organic reach is slipping; try these tips to increase your engagement!
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.