We’re all familiar with the dangers of wasting time on your personal Facebook page, but you might not realize all the ways your business is also wasting time on the network.To avoid any potential hurdles to your Facebook productivity, we’ve come up with a list of ways you could be mismanaging important social media minutes.
Continue reading to find out:
- The dangers of republishing without reformatting
- Why failing to test your ads is a costly mistake
- How to save time in the future by spending more time now
9 ways your business is wasting time on Facebook
1. Creating overly promotional content
You’ve probably heard this advice before, but it’s worth repeating. Content creation is time-consuming, and you don’t want those hours of hard work to go to waste. If you’ve been wondering about the reason for that drastic dip in your business’s organic reach, you probably haven’t heard our calls to halt the creation of overly promotional content.
Facebook has been encouraging content creators to replace the straight-up promo material with stories that add value or provide more history for your business’s products and services. Facebook’s algorithm favors posts that aren’t overly promotional Helpful and shareable content has a higher likelihood of being seen by bigger audience
2. Republishing content on Facebook without reformatting
Here’s a thought process that might sound familiar: Instagram runs on beautiful images. Images increase engagement on Facebook. Instagram is part of Facebook. So I should repost all my Instagram photos automatically on my Facebook Page, right?Even if it may seem like a time-saving technique to automatically post the same update to multiple networks, it might cost you reach on both networks. For starters, your brand’s Instagram profile and Facebook Page may be serving different purposes, so content from one may not fit the overall tone of messaging on the other.
Your audiences on different networks may also be drastically different, so what resonates with your Instagram followers may not quite jive with your Facebook fans. If you want to reuse a photo, make sure to provide enough context so that it is actually of value to your audience.
Finally, these posts just don’t look great a lot of the time. When you automatically share a post to Facebook from your Instagram account, your caption and hashtags go along with it. If you’ve tagged anybody by their Instagram handle, this will look odd in a Facebook post as Instagram usernames are not the same as they are on Facebook. If you’ve used a ton of hashtags, these will also look strange on Facebook.
3. Getting in comment wars
As of April 2017, Facebook Messenger has 1.2 billion monthly active users worldwide. With so many Messenger users, there’s a good chance you can engage with any disgruntled customer here instead of the comment section under a post. If a disgruntled customer comments on your Facebook post, reply quickly and reach out to them via Messenger.It might go without saying, but it’s also a good idea to stay away from any negative Facebook comment threads from competitor brands. It’s important to be aware of these conversations, but participating in them isn’t necessary—especially if none of the negative claims are substantiated. You risk doing more damage to your online reputation if you do get involved in a comment war with your competition—especially if this is done at the expense of your engagement with followers and fans.
4. Liking irresponsibly
Just…
