For the bus or train commuters amongst you, you may have noticed an interesting article in the Metro this morning. The article is entitled “Facebook is rife with app copycats”
The article highlights research conducted by the National Academy of Sciences which, after tracking 100 million app installations, found that online behaviour is more similar to offline trends than we first thought. It seems that rather than becoming fans of the best brands or best sellers, a users decision to like a page depends very much on whether their friends have liked it as well.
A lot of this could be accredited to EdgeRank and other algorithms within Facebook that share certain news stories with people who, based on their affinity with certain friends, Facebook believe will like it too. It could be argued this is just simply human nature which is becoming more and more apparent on social media. Well, whatever the reason its great news for us social media marketers.
We often say that the most crucial thing to master when it comes to social media marketing is strategy. Well no matter whether it is to increase brand awareness, increase traffic to your website or simply to generate sales, the results of this research are certainly good news. Why? Because this ‘copycat’ mentality as the Metro describes can encourage steady growth amongst our fan pages.
So how can you take advantage of the ‘Facebook sheep factor’?
Here are three tips:
- Always ask questions. Whenever you’re posting on Facebook your aim should be to encourage engagement. After all, the more engagement your page has the more people your content is seen by and therefore (providing the content is good) the more likes your page will receive.
- Use pictures for everything. No matter the post, always accompany it with an image. This will allow the post to stand out more in peoples newsfeed and allow for more people to see it.
- If you want engagement then engage! Sounds simple? Well you would be surprised at the amount of people who do not respond to questions or comments on their own posts, or even worse delete any challenging posts completely! Always make sure you reply to questions or feedback.