increasing visibility on facebook & using it to capture useful data

There is a lot of murmurs in the indie community about Facebook reducing the amount of people who see your posts. I personally love my little community of monster lovers that gather on my page for my shop, Lu & Ed but I am not altogether too worried about Facebook's changes.



The amount of posts inactive people who like your page don't see doesn't worry me because I engage my community. The more people who interact with posts on your fan page, the more it will appear in the news feed of people who have liked your page. The Facebook algorithm is really complex, but the brute of it is that simple - if you are creating great content that people are responding to, it will be shown to more people. And not only do I engage my community on Facebook, but I listen to them and convert their responses into useful data to make my business even better.

Using this method of creating community-building conversations, I doubly benefit because I increase the amount of people seeing posts from my shop's Facebook page and I am able to capture data to convert into graphs that help me make better products. How do I do it?

I post a question on my Facebook page in the morning, between 8-9 (my personal peak time to post). A simple question that requires one word or one sentence answers, that almost anyone can answer. You can see an example question here.

Then I create a Google doc & a color graph. I make columns for all the answers (for instance, this question I will make two rows, boy and girls & ages unknown - 0-18). I will use my graph to determine my audience – if I have a staggering amount of girls vs boys, I would know I should incorporate more girly colors and prints into Mon-stors, for instance. Or if I have a large amount of followers who have babies/toddlers, I could try to reintroduce my monster face lovey blankets to generate more interest from that crowd, or tweak my marketing a bit more to show more Mon-stors being used for storage in nurseries.

Since the question is so easy to answer, it gets a lot of replies – the more replies the more reach. In 24 hours the post reached 1230 people (About 62% of my audience), received 77 comments and my fan page received 6 new "likes". The number of your reach continues to tick up as the post appears in people’s newsfeeds as their friends comment on it.

When I post content like this, I tend to get 5-15 new followers and my reach gets a boost that lasts about a week – so I try to publish data capturing content like this once a week or every other week.

Examples of other content I have posted to capture data and encourage conversation in my Facebook community:

What is your favorite color, what is your LEAST favorite color, what is your kids favorite color, their least favorite color (all broken up over several months) – then I turn all the replies into a graph. I now know that blue, green and pink are the most popular and best selling colors for my products, while brown, black & yellow are my least popular.

Where are you from – this was my MOST popular post ever, reaching over 1700 people when my fan page only had about 1450 fans, and resulting in almost 70 comments. I collected this data with the intent to book craft shows in bigger cities where I had the most concentrated audience, but haven’t yet used it.

And miscellaneous monster related posts, like what is your favorite number of eyes, favorite color combos (pink and black was a big winner, followed by purple and yellow), what do you use Mon-stors for (I used this data to determine new ways to market Mon-stors in ways people hadn’t thought of yet to show how versatile they are).

Super easy, right? Obviously, when you first start publishing this type of content you won't get very many responses, because it takes time to build engagement. Be patient and just continue publishing great content and conversing with your community on Facebook! Reach out in your communities and engage with other maker's page posts - most likely they will reciprocate and become one of your brand's biggest supporters, sharing, liking and commenting on your content!

The best part, is like I said above, you doubly benefit from this activity on Facebook because you can collect valuable data from your engaged audience, at the same time as boosting your reach and widening your engaged audience for a short period of time. The next best part, is it’s free!

What have you found to help your posts reach more people on Facebook - without paying for an ad?

6 comments:

  1. People love to talk about their kids and since I make kid's items, I will ask about favorite colors, shows, patterns. Thank you for an awesome article!

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  2. What awesome advice! Do you have any advice on how to get people to see your posts initially?

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    1. My biggest advice is to grow your following organically! Join communities of people that can relate to you and your products and BE there. Share content from your page in other places and invite others to join in on the conversation. Make your page about community, not about your products, and you will see better results! ♥ Treat fans like friends and watch your community flourish!

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    2. Thanks, Cody! Sounds like a great idea. I appreciate it!

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  3. People love to share random facts about themselves. I find myself making the questions more general so that a wider audience can respond to them. Instead of "Are you a PC or console gamer?" I ask "What was the last boardgame you played?" Pictures have a larger reach than text. I've also found that sharing exciting news about a new movie or a popular TV show reaches many people if I tag it and share in on my Twitter too.

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  4. Great tips! I definitely should join some more groups on FB, and utilize my art page more. At the moment, it's one of those things that I let slip through the cracks, and I should really give it some more attention!

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