Over 50 million Fan Pages have been created on Facebook. And with that many now online, you've got to assume that some are doing better than others. Many small businesses jumped on the Fan Page bandwagon over the past few year. First they loaded up their pages with “likes” from fans. Then they posted some interesting content, details about what was happening in their business, etc. And, while the response was good at first, fan interaction seemed to dwindle until the point that all they can hear is the sound of crickets chirping.
Nobody is listening anymore. It’s a common problem, and if you find yourself in this situation, there’s a simple path out of it.
So let’s take a look to see what stage of this process you might be in right now, and find a way for you to fix it.
Stage 1 MILD You’ve got the fans there, but not enough engagement
At this stage, all is not lost. You can see that some of what you are posting on your Fan Page is clearly working. But that also means that some of it is not.
What to Do
Fortunately, Facebook has got you covered here. At the top of your Fan Page, you’ll see a tab with the word “insights” on it. A simple click on that tab will reveal a world of amazing data for you to use as a guide to what’s working on your page and what’s not working. What do you do with this information?
Easy: stop doing the things that don’t work, and start doing lots more of the things which do work.
Stage 2 MODERATE Your fans have stopped interacting with your page altogether
This may be the most common stage for Fan Pages. Why? Because over time, as Facebook has grown, most users connected with more friends, and followed more pages than could possibly be displayed in their news feed. And with a limited number of posts we can see in a given day, Facebook has had to make choices about what to show us, and what not to show us. So if someone liked your fan page 2 years ago, but has been spending more time interacting with friends and other pages, they will probably not see much of your content.
What to Do
The solution here is to run a campaign to get your fans reengaged. This might typically take the form of a contest, poll, or similar activity, but the key here is to ease them back into your word by paying making a nominal investment in boosting your posts to ensure they are seen.
Stage 3 SEVERE You never had real, engaged fans to begin with
You might be surprised to learn that in the race to get people to “like” their Fan Page, many businesses looked to quantity instead of quality when it came to fans. And more often than not, those new fans were people who had very little likelihood of becoming actual customers. In fact, sometimes they were from some country halfway around the world. And sometimes, they weren’t even real people at all, but fake accounts created by unscrupulous social media marketers to help you “get fans.” Has this happened to you?
What to Do
In these situations, Facebook sees virtually no activity on these page, because your fans, if they do actually exist, have no interest in or real connection to you. And that means you’ll be punished for the lack of activity on your Fan Page, by not receiving any organic reach with your posts.
The options, therefore, are a bit more extreme than those discussed above. You could either manually delete each of these offending “fans,” or simply start a brand new Fan Page.