Create Content For Facebook - What Mediators Need To Know
How to get started creating Facebook content. This is building off of a previous article, How To Set Up An Engaging Facebook Profile, about creating an engaging Facebook business page for marketing your brand or practice. If you haven’t already set up a business page, check out this video. Creating a strong profile sets you up for success in creating future content, and it will make this video way more effective.
As the world’s most popular social media platform with almost 3 billion active users, and high rates of user engagement, Facebook can be a valuable tool for marketing your practice. As a brief recap of Facebook’s user demographics:
1. There’s a relatively equal distribution of male-identifying and female-identifying users, so it’s a pretty safe bet regardless of your target audience, and:
2. Older generations tend to be more active on Facebook compared to other social media platforms. Many social media platforms’ user demographics tend to skew towards lower age ranges, so this definitely makes it stand out, and it can be helpful if your target audience leans toward older age groups.
If Facebook seems like it could be beneficial for marketing your practice, keep watching. In this video, we’ll focus on what topics you want to choose, what forms of content you want to use, and how you want to go about posting your content going forward. We’ll also include some helpful tips at the end of the video that can help you maximize your outreach.
Going into the content topics:
● First, you want to make sure you have your target audience established. We talked about this in a previous video, A Niche To Scratch, so check that out if you want a more in-depth explanation. For a brief recap, however, this will represent the general interests of people you want to view your content or who are most likely to view your content.
● When considering what topics you want to cover with your content, consider key areas of interest that are relevant to your industry and your practice. You also want these topics to be relevant to your target audience.
● To keep content consistent, it can be helpful to focus your content in these key areas and not stray too far outside of them. It’s not rigid, and know that you can obviously change them in the future and deviate from them slightly, but it can help serve as a guideline to keep you on track as you’re starting out.
● You really just want to focus on keeping posts tastefully informative and within a reasonable scope. If you’re helping your followers improve their understanding of the resolution industry and relevant topics, it gives them a reason to keep consuming your content. This is also beneficial for two other reasons:
○ It helps build trust with followers and establish an online presence, and:
○ It helps your followers gain knowledge, that will help them navigate the industry if they ever want to seek out resolution services.
Now, going into different forms of content. There are a lot of different mediums you could choose from, but the key is including multiple different forms of content to keep things balanced.
● Some examples of informative content, like we just discussed, can include brief, unbiased points about current events, and provide valuable, educated insight.
● Other types of informative content can be visual; infographics can be a great way to stand out, especially if you have a visual arts background or are considering outsourcing this to someone who does. These are particularly good for Facebook and tend to get pretty high rates of engagement. If you’re considering learning it, some user-friendly, good platforms include Figma, Canva, and Freeform (if you have a Macbook). What’s more, if you have a blog post or podcast that’s been doing well, you can create a related infographic. When posting that infographic, if you’re comfortable doing so, you can include a modest call to action to encourage people to check out that blog post or podcast to learn more. The key is making sure that this doesn’t sound pushy, and that these types of calls to action do not make up a lot of your content.
● You can also take advantage of Facebook’s story feature; these are short, mainly visual pieces of content that generally expire after a certain period of time. You can use stories for pictures and
● Finally, although you want to keep the majority of your content informative, delegating a portion of it to interactive content can be a great way to get connections engaged and get conversations started. Interactive content can include polls, questions at the end of posts, and discussions.
Now that you’ve got your topics and mediums figured out, having a content plan can help you put that into action.
● Many people find that planning this stuff in advance can be helpful, not only for keeping yourself on track, but also for keeping your social media content cohesive, spaced out, and well-balanced.
● One strategy that can help you manage your time is to get out a calendar, whether it’s a physical planner, paper calendar, or calendar app, and start mapping out the approximate dates and times you’d want to post content on Facebook over the next 45-90 days. How often you’d want to post depends on whether you’re using other social media platforms to market, and how much free time you have.
● You’ll probably want to aim to post at least once a week, and it probably wouldn’t hurt to post more than that. Just don’t post more than once or twice a day, as it can minimize the attention that your individual posts get, and negatively saturate your followers’ news feeds.
● You can also consider coming up with content ideas a couple of weeks in advance, to make sure your upcoming content is appropriately balanced. Acknowledge that you can absolutely change these based on current events, but it can just serve as a baseline, and you have a go-to topic that’s well-thought-out if you’re short on time on post days.
Finally, here are a few content optimization strategies that will be the icing on the cake:
● You can always try getting your profile verified on Facebook. This tends to be hit or miss, but having a little blue checkmark next to your page can look good to potential followers, and shows that your page is reputable.
● You can also create or join Facebook groups, where you can connect with others over shared interests and start discussions. This can be very valuable for growing your network, but it can also provide the opportunity to be a part of a community.
● Last but not least, while creating and posting content is free, you *can* accelerate things with paid options, such as Facebook ads or boosting your content to improve its outreach.
Now that you’ve got all of this information down, you hopefully have a clearer idea of how you want to go about everything, and you feel more equipped to build your brand through engaging, informative content on Facebook. Thank you so much for tuning into my video today.
