Blog: Social Media Tip of the Day – Building a Facebook Community

As a Facebook page grows, people tend to get the feeling that it will become more and more impersonal. This mildly speaks to our own insecurities and as a a brand ambassador for whomever the given client is, we must prove our commitment to the fans. The Facebook platform makes it difficult because a Page does not offer cross-conversations, so conversations become silos. AFacebook Page is a community, but it is usually a loosely-tied community of lurkers and inactives who don’t have the opportunity to interact with each other or the Page often enough.

Creating a Facebook community vibe takes a lot of work, discovery, and dedication. Facebook is constantly evolving and a series of short term goals paired with basic long term goals, will be your best bet.

Who’s the audience for your community?

One of the key issues is understanding exactly who the audience is and why they are fans. The obvious thing is to ask your fans why they like the Page. Digging deep into the varied interests, but ideally you go deeper. Weighing in their location, gender, age, income, attitude, education and lifestyles.

What’s in it for them?

Why will a person join your community? Why will this person be willing toparticipate in that community on a regular basis? This is going to be somewhat of a trial and error phase when establishing the brands voice through its core principles and expanding on that. Generating amusing content is completely up to you. The platform has been around long enough to have standard categories most of us can agree on. Such as contests, quizzes, polls, humor, trivia, jokes, quotes, national debate, patriotism, breaking news, interesting facts, amusing pictures or videos.

Promotional opportunities

Ensure that you’ve laid down a solid foundation to scale up a live and engaging community. Facebook advertising is one the most powerful and least understood opportunities. Stay updated and be prepared for any of Facebooks changes that might present a new opportunity to target an audience. Facebook apps are extremely customizable to be used a number of ways.

Tracking your page

Luckily there are a number of analytics programs available to see how your audience has reacted to your published content.

Facebook Grader - A tool designed by hubspot to help you asses the ranking of your Facebook page among other pages.

Social Page Evaluator – Designed by Virtue to help marketers to get a better understanding of a Facebok pages value.

Likealyzer – Gives you somewhat of a brutally honest evaluation of your page and makes suggestions based on that.

The team of experts here at WeShareMedia are always on the lookout for beta version of analytics software for any of the major platforms. Obviously some of them are going to work better for different types of pages and goals.