5 Tips to Help Build Your Facebook Following

Facebook can often be the trickiest social space for bloggers, and most of you whom I asked have said you absolutely favour twitter.  But building a large and relevant Facebook following can be an invaluable asset to your blog. Not only are people highly engaged on Facebook, your posts stick around for a lot longer (the average lifespan of a tweet is about 1 hour, whereas on Facebook your posts can hang around on peoples feeds for days). Not only that, but in terms of competitive followings there is more of a chance for you to stand out; plenty of bloggers have worked really hard to boost their twitter followings into the thousands but not quite as many have managed to match this on Facebook. This means if you manage to make it on Facebook you’ll have a unique selling point when you’re in discussions with the brands you love.

However it’s not easy! Facebook has no quick fix, and unless you have a budget for Facebook ads (I’m going to go ahead and assume many of you don’t) then you’re going to have to work hard and build your following on your own- but not quite on your own, because as always we have some great tips to get you started!

Create Posts Specifically for Facebook

Lots of people make the mistake of syndicating the same content across all social media channels. Although I am fully aware this can save time, it really really really doesn’t work as well as creating specific posts for each social media channel. For starters, you can obviously use more characters on Facebook than you can on twitter- so make use of them rather than just copying the 140 characters you’re planning for Twitter.

Create Images

Facebook is a visual network, there have been dozens of studies concluding that visuals often get far more interaction than text alone on Facebook. Creating images specifically to accompany your Facebook posts can go down really well. For example, if you’re going to write a status about your latest post, chose a lovely image to go with it and perhaps layer some text over the top. The point is to create something eye-catching that will stand out on your followers’ timeline’s.

Share the Posts of Others

This is just not done enough on Facebook. Bloggers are amazing at sharing the content of others and retweeting on Twitter- but on Facebook this just doesn’t seem to happen nearly enough. Sharing things from your fellow bloggers on Facebook helps you build a network on there- remember it’s called social media.

Post at the Weekend

For the most part people spend the majority of their time online at the weekend, but this is often a time that both brands and bloggers post slightly less! If you don’t fancy sitting at a computer checking Facebook during the summer weekends then just schedule a few posts to go out over the weekend.

Don’t Post As Much As You Do On Other Social Networks!

At the start of this post I mentioned that one of the benefits on Facebook was that on Facebook your posts can hang around on peoples feeds for days. This also has its down-falls; if too many of your posts are hanging around at once then people might get a tad bored of you content. This is obviously not in any way ideal- so limit the amount that you post. In many cases 1-2 posts a day maximum will be more than enough, so all the more reason to follow the first two points and really work on making each post count!

Do you have a Facebook for your blog? How are you finding building your following? Let us know in the comments below, and if you’d like to join us on Facebook you can do so here: