31 Aug 2011
Getting your posts to appear on your fans’ Facebook news feeds is sort of like a challenge. You need to be posting at the right time with consistency, and you need to be able to draw in the crowd with the content you’re posting.
That means more likes, comments and more likes in comments. As a brand and business, you also want to be able to market yourself as an authority in your industry. That means no-nonsense posts and down-to-business insights and articles on the latest developments. But how do you draw attention and become as relevant to your business as possible at the same time?
That’s simple. Use chat ups. Chat ups are great ways of engaging customers and at the same time raising your interaction for your Facebook page. They’re pretty simple to set up and all you’ll really need is a Hootsuite, TweetDeck or any other automated post tool to help you out in posting these attention getters.
Here’s a short list of chat ups you may want to use:
- Questions and polls – this one is a direct question that seeks to get people to answer. Make sure that the question is open ended and that people can still discuss their thoughts and opinions. Keep in mind to be thankful that they shared their time with you.
- Fill in the blanks – This one gets your users to guess which word comes next. While the main point of the chat-up is to inform, people tend to mess around with this one because it’s funny and it gives people a little look on the bright side every once in a while.
- Breaking News – By that, I mean news that can actually affect a person’s way of living. It is not just the typical news that people can choose not to care about. It has to be something that establishes urgency and a call-to-action.
- Tip of the day – When you want to tell your fans that you’re a professional at what you do, you’ll want to give them tips. They could be posted at a daily basis, but I recommend using it at least thrice or twice a week.
- Caption this – Of all the chat ups, this one was the most particularly successful one at drawing more attention and impressions too. Post pictures that resemble authenticity in the workplace and ask people to provide a textual description as to what’s going on.
This chat up gets its power from humor and if you plan to use this one, be sure that besides having enough pictures for posting, you have the sense of humor to go with it too.
Remember to use these chat-ups only as needed. You want your folks craving for these pieces of information. As much as possible, set up schedules for these so your audience have something to look forward to from you.
Let me know your thoughts, folks.
