Facebook Marketing and How the Timeline Works

First off – a hat tip to Dru Collie, Director at Sole Hope for the link. I’m usually off somewhere learning about how aliens run the White House or about David Yow’s cats, so it’s nice to have friends that think to send me interesting tidbits. If you’d like to send me tidbits, I’d love to see ’em. I heart tidbits because my caffeine-addled attention span on the internet is right around nothing.

Which brings me, in an incredibly round-about fashion, to my point: How Timeline Radically Changes Your Facebook Marketing Strategy.

Now, a lot of the article is vague and somewhat obvious if you think a little bit about what you’re doing on Facebook, but the most applicable and helpful bit for me was the first “Marketing Takeaway.”

It suggests that you put out content at different times and monitor the success of those posts and interactions based on time posted, using Facebook Insights. That way, due to the short lifetime of a Facebook post (3.2 hours,) you can deduct when the most optimal times to post are, and when your “audience” is online and receptive. Now, one of the other things that looking at your Facebook Insights* does is tell you how effective your subjects and content is with your current audience, and whether or not Facebook is a good investment of time and money.

In everything that you do, marketing-wise, it’s best practice to actually monitor the returns you get for any effort. Newspaper ads are expensive – do you have a way to monitor what sort of interest you garner from that expenditure? Facebook pages and posts and interaction are cheap, by comparison – but they can eat up a lot of time, so it’s better to know if social marketing is even effective for your business. It might not be – and no matter how good your Facebook pages look or how awesome your posts are, it could all be a waste of time.

So – use your Insights and make sure you’re actually making some headway with Facebook. Think about the whole thing a little differently and objectively and make sure your current social media strategy is actually valid and offers a return on your investment – time or money. Don’t let some slick-selling, longhaired dude that smells like coffee and wastes too much time getting to the point sell you something you don’t need. If you don’t need it and it doesn’t work for you and your clients/customers, it’s not worth having, no matter how hip it is.

Give us a shout and let’s discuss your Facebook page, your “fans” and whether or not this is even a game you should be playing. We’ll be honest with you, even if it means we’re not going to make any dough. If nothing else, we’ll shake hands, buy you a cup of coffee and wish you the best in the future. Both our businesses will be better for having met and discussed and thought. Real social marketing, right?

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