In a “like” driven world, getting more people to give their stamp of “like” approval on your page is hard. Below are just five things that I recommend trying when you’re looking to get more likes on your Region’s Facebook page.
1. Be consistent
Try to post on your Region’s Facebook page at least once a week, so your page is always fresh with new information. Don’t leave a stale page, it’s the worst advertisement for a Region!
2. Use pictures and lots of them
There is a reason why platforms like Instagram and Pinterest do so well in the social media realm. They use photos! On Facebook, pictures tend to be the most shared of all posts and you can really say 1000 words with the tap of an upload. Plus, people love to see their kids, so if you have pictures from the games, use them!
According to AllFacebook.com, Facebook will debut a new News Feed (say that five times fast!) pretty soon. The News Feed redesign (pictured above) will bring the mobile Facebook experience and the desktop Facebook experience closer together, by focusing on imagery and changing the font.
How will this affect your Region's page?
Facebook announced today they’ve updated their user guidelines and will no longer require that Facebook promotions be administered through third-party applications.
What does this mean? If you want to have a contest on your Facebook page, you don’t have to pay a Facebook-app company to create and administer it for you. Which is a huge time and money saver.
This means you can upload a photo to your Region’s Facebook page and ask people to leave comments, like or share to enter to win a prize. Many of you may have not known functions like this were illegal. They were! And if Facebook would’ve come across posts like this in the past, your page would have been in danger of getting deleted.
Facebook has debuted another fun new feature: post embedding. Embedded Facebook posts will allow you to take a post from your Region's Facebook page (or AYSO's National Facebook page) and embed it on a website, blog and more.
Once the post is embedded, users will be able to view the post anywhere you embed it, and engage with it by sharing, liking or leaving a comment. The above is a preview of what an embedded Facebook post looks like.
Embedding your Facebook posts on other websites is a great way to get your community engaged with your Region and drive valuable traffic to your Facebook page. Here's why:
I hope that you promote your Facebook page to all of your Region’s families and volunteers during registration events and the like. But if someone is out there on Facebook searching for your Region page, is it easy to find?
For example, if a user goes into the search bar, and types in “Region 32…” Region 32, Region 320, Region 3204 should all automatically populate in the drop-down predicted results. Or, if a user searches for their local AYSO by city and/or state, that should also automatically bring up results.
Here’s how to ensure that your Facebook page is searchable:
Once you build a sizable and engaged social media audience (for a typical-sized Region, I would say this is about 300 Facebook and/or Twitter followers), your online presence can be a useful asset to your Region’s local sponsors.
Whether you’re trying to please your current sponsors, or looking to bag a few new ones, here are a few ways to use social media to promote your Region’s sponsors (or potential sponsors).
The Webmaster Info Spot has been on a roll lately with informative posts on using/editing photos. To cap off the unofficial series, I wanted to share this good-to-know tidbit of Facebook advice:
Posts with images will receive higher engagement than posts without.
AllFacebook.com did some research, and they discovered that “images have been the No.1 driver of engagement on a page since timeline launched.” That means that images beat out links, videos and text-only status updates for the top spot. And this means that images catch the eye of your Facebook fans more than anything else.
“Posts including a photo album or a picture can generate two times more engagement than other post types,” reports AllFacebook.com
