“My content is not working, I only have friends and family engaging on my posts.”
If this is you, keep reading. I want to address the issue of engagement, and the understanding and the expectations you may and should have when you are growing your visibility on Facebook.
There are several factors that have to be in place before you can even slightly consider that your content is not performing well:
1. YOUR AUDIENCE
How many friends do you have and who is in your friend lists mostly? A couple of hundreds? Mostly family, friends and old co-workers and stuff?
In order to determine if your content is ‘working”, first you need to present it to the right audience. That means you need to constantly and actively grow your friend list.
You need to send friend requests to people that you share interests with (you can start with looking for them inside Facebook groups you share). Your personal profile limit is 5000 and you should set a goal to reach it within 12 to 18 months -if you are serious about growing your visibility, of course.
(If not, please stop reading and leave this page.)
2. YOUR CONTENT
When you create content that presents you in multiple dimensions and is authentic, you naturally start attracting like-minded people in your audience and repelling those who are not aligned.
This is a great process, but it takes time.
Therefore your focus must be on creating more content and consistency – NOT on how much engagement you get at this stage. It is not in any way a metric to measure how effective your content is. In fact, it is not important at all who engages, you just want to get more eyes on your stuff.
3. REACH
This is what you are missing – every time someone engages with your post, Facebook will slightly push it out for more people to see. Every time you reply to the comment, same happens.
Let family and friend engage – this only helps you reach of the post to more people, who may not be engaging, but may well be watching and reading your stuff. Not everyone understands Facebook and how to use it (you probably don’t too, since you are reading this, so we need to be patent with our audience).
4. CALL TO ACTION
You need to think of content that is focused on discussions just as much as content positioning you as an expert. Even a silly joke post that will get a lot of comments will work for your advantage as you get the benefit of increased reach, and also the people who engage will see more of your posts – but then it brings me back to the first point- you need to grow your audience in order to start attracting people who resonate with you. If you do not grow your audience, you only get those family members and friends who engage to see more of your posts.
CONCLUSION
Here is the strategy that works every time:
Focus on growing your audience and consistently post various types of valuable powerful content on your profile (more than once a day is perfect).
And stop expecting quick results. This is not a microwave oven.
Would you speak a foreign language fluently if you did not spend time learning words and grammar and practicing for a good while?
Visibility is a long game.
TRUST your journey.
And if you want to know what to post, why not check out my Engagement Masterclass? Click here for more details.