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The Social Marketers Guide toManaging A Large Facebook Page

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Introduction

Understand your audience

Everyone is a competitor on social

Optimize your workflow

Deliver the service your audience expects

Make your content go further, every time

Using Facebook’s native paid ads to maximum effect

Conclusion

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Managing a large Facebook page comes with a unique set of challenges. While having a large audience is great and gives you fantastic opportunities to generate high Reach and a lot of Interactions from your activities, an audience of scale presents you with a set of challenges that you need to prepare for in order to succeed.

The amount of fans a brand has on its Facebook Page has been an obsession of page admins. For some, this was seen as the sole measurement of success. We now know that this is a vanity metric and that having a quality audience is much more important than having a large audience.

We’ve studied over 43,000 brand pages with a focus on large pages (more than 200,000 fans) and extra large pages (more than 1 million fans) in order to give you practical tips to combat the challenges that a large audience presents, such as the need for extra content, managing growth, scale of customer care, and the need for an efficient internal workflow to ensure that your page runs smoothly.

Introduction

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When managing a large audience on your Facebook page, it is essential to know that audience. The first step is to segment it in terms of age, gender, language, location, and the times when fans are engaging with your content.

Segmentation offers great opportunities to target content, special offers, or news to the right fans. The ad spend can be significantly decreased by targeting the groups that interact with you the most. That’s why the quality of your day-to-day content and it’s relevancy to your audience is crucial. Social media advertising continues to grow, with spending increasing 29% year-on-year – so you need to know how to do it properly.

Understand Your Audience

Picture 1: Knowing your audience demographics is the first step in knowing what to publish. If your facebook page isn’t representative of your target audience the best way to combat this is through Facebook Page Like advertisements, where you can target certain demographics only in order to force a re-balancing of your audience.

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Identifying key influencers is another important element, as finding potential brand ambassadors can again change your content focus to try to engage with that audience subset in a different way. Alternatively, identifying potential troublemakers amongst your audience is also important, allowing you to have your team ready to step in and moderate if needed (see below).

What time zone should my community managers cover?

Shall I target posts in different languages?

Should I transform my page to a global page?

When should I schedule Posts?

Which gender & age groups are my fans?

Examples of Social Metrics

Distribution of Fans

User Activity

Fans by Langugage

Interactions by hour & day

Fans & Engaged & Reached by Demography

Picture 2: Audience demographics are a key part of any strategy. If you find that your audience is in multiple markets with multiple languages, then your plans will need to be more advanced. This will involve expanding the hours of your customer care, acquiring language-specific commu-nity managers, and target your content according to market. A global audience requires around-the-clock customer care - sometimes in different time zones in different languages.

Picture 3: Tracking Key influencers (people who engage with your Facebook page most frequently) can help you identify potential brand lovers and brand haters, or discover customer issues you weren’t aware of before they get out of hand. Socialbakers Analytics provides you with a list of Facebook users ranked by the number of posts or comments they have made to your page. You’ll also be informed about their latest activity and access an overview of their interactions with you by clicking “Details”.

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Understanding your audience allows you to engage them more effectively. You need to have an element of control over the conversation and you need to know who is engaging regularly and who is raising issues and potentially undermining your message. This can help you to stay on top of your customer care and develop relationships further. It can also help you identify common issues amongst some users which you can then address.

Your competition on social isn’t just direct competitors in the traditional sense. On Facebook, the com-petition is anyone who is competing for the attention of your audience. This includes celebrities, brands from other industries, and users’ family and friends. This broadens your competitive set and makes you realize the importance of strong content.

Pages are posting more and more, leading to an increased clutter in the Facebook News Feed, meaning that the organic reach of pages is naturally declining. Large pages post approximately double the posts of smaller pages on a monthly basis. This is exaggerated further for large pages as their audience is often competed over by more brands, and a slip in engagement rate can lead to a large slip in reach.

Everyone is a Competitor on Social

Celebrites - 27 %

Brands - 25 %

Entertainment - 25 %

Interest - 10 %

Media - 9 %

Other - 4 %

FMCG - 20 %

Fashion - 11 %

Ecommerce - 9 %

Beauty - 7 %

Electronics - 6 %

Retail - 6 %

Retail Food - 5 %

Auto - 4 %

Alcohol - 4 %

Others - 32 %

What brands Users like?Relative Industry like distribution

What type of Facebook Pages Users like?Relative Page type distribution

Picture 4: 25% of Facebook pages that the average user likes are Brands; among those, the FMCG industry’s pages have the strongest presence. However, it is important to realize that when it comes to battling for fans’ attentions, brands are not just competing against each other - they are also competing with their fans’ friends and hundreds of other pages - everything from celebrities to news can take away from your brands’ share of their time.

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Understanding your performance in the context of your wider competitive set is also hugely important so that you can benchmark, analyze performance, and improve.

THE BEST COMPARABLE SOCIAL METRICS:

Audience Metrics

Post Metrics

Engagement Metrics

Customer Care Metrics

Fan Growth # Admin Posts Total Interactions Response Rate

Distribution of Fans Post Sources Engagement Rate Response Time

User Activity Top Content Sharability Responded / Unresponded questions

For managers of large pages, it is crucial to analyze the competition - by looking at their content, both successful and unsuccessful, you can create better, more-engaging content. Social metrics are key to this understanding. Some metrics are private - such as Reach and Clickthrough rates - and therefore can’t be compared. But many metrics are publicly comparable such as total interactions and audience size.

RR for Questions

Abs. Change in Fans

Rel. Change in Fans

Avg. Page ER

Admin Posts

Avg. Post ER

UserPosts

Total Interac.

Abs. Change in Fans

Rel. Change in Fans

Admin Posts

Avg. Page ER

Avg. Post ER

Total Interactions

User Posts

RR for Questions

18 072

+4,78 %

53

0,28 % (-0,10 %)

0,15 % (-0,07 %)

31 827

50

50,00 %

994,09

+1,10 %

31,45

0,49 % (+0,01 %)

0,30 % (-0,00 %)

9 815,75

34,96

55,08 %

Mercedes-Benz UKKPI Check

from Jun 14, 2014 to Jul 14 2014Auto United Kingdom

Now that the News Feed is such a cluttered environment, it is essential that you gain every advantage you can to get ahead and win the war for reach.

Picture 5: An example of the KPI check feature from Socialbakers Analytics, comparing Mercedes Benz UK to their local industry benchmark. From this comparison alone, we can see that Mercedes is performing above-average when it comes to attracting new fans, admin and user activity and total interactions, which is a core engagement metric. On the other hand, it is falling behind the industry standard when it comes to relative engagement and social customer care.

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Of the pages studied, just 19% of the pages with more than 200,000 fans use a social media manage-ment tool like Socialbakers Builder to schedule their content and optimize their workflow. This number keeps increasing as page size grows - almost 25% of extra-large pages use a management tool, versus 10% of smaller pages. This shows the need for a more advanced solution when it comes to managing content and workflow for pages with large communities.

The advantages of using Socialbakers solutions is that you can schedule content in advance, assign content creation roles, measure admin performance, and control your workflow amongst your team.

Pages with more than 200k fans average 1.9 posts a day, while smaller pages post 1.1 times per day. This need for extra content means it’s essential to create an internal workflow for your team to follow. Posting two times a day doesn’t just mean dealing with content creation and publishing, but also the subsequent customer care, participation in the discussion, and collection of feedback from the comments.

The increased workloads of page admins is just one part of the challenge large pages face. The amount of User Posts on the timeline is 11 times higher than in the case of smaller pages, regardless of industry. This means that admins of large pages have to deal with 20 user posts every day on average – most of these being customers or potential customers asking questions or expressing themselves, awaiting response. In certain industries such as airlines or telco, the demand for two-way communication is even higher.

Large pages need to set up an advanced workflow to deal with the increased number of enquiries and comments that flow from fans as the audience grows. This workflow will need to involve multiple people from multiple departments, including the marketing team, PR, customer services, and external agencies. Having clear processes with defined roles and responsibilities through user rights management allows you to handle this effectively.

Optimize Your Workflow

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The key is to get your team aligned with clear roles and responsibilities, and to have an approval system in place with full accountability to prevent social media fails such as the recent US Airways debacle from unfolding, where an inappropriate picture was tweeted in response to a customer query in error. This level of sophistication will allow you to report and evaluate performance in order to optimize on an ongoing basis.

EXAMPLES OF ROLES:

Customer Care Team Publishing Team Managing Team

Reply on posts (write comments, replies)

Reply on posts (write comments, replies) Page Reporting

Assign posts & tweets to users

Create message (post, tweet) Team Reporting

Ban users Publish to social network Link Reporting

Delete, Label and Archive posts

Approve messages for publishing

Edit User Rights & Roles

Picture 6: Effective social media management often requires powerful collaboration tools that enable user rights, approvals, and internal performance reporting. In the picture above, you can see an example of a report on team performance from Socialbakers Builder that shows interactions, conversation content distribution, and which identifies the account’s most engaging admins.

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Large pages naturally receive a much higher level of user posts than smaller pages - KLM received nearly 19,000 user posts in Q1 alone. This equates to over 200 per day, meaning that dedicated resource is needed to manage this level of interaction. When a brand is receiving this much interaction it is crucial that they have dedicated roles and work processes to ensure that users get a timely response, and to make sure that nothing is missed.

This isn’t just the case for client-focused services, such as airlines, finance, or telco, but applies to all large pages. For instance, Samsung Mobile receives almost 5,000 customer queries quarterly, Walmart over 3,200, and Subway Restaurants more than 2,500. The larger the audience, the more likelihood you have of generating a high volume of user posts, so prepare accordingly.

It’s essential to respond to customer questions promptly and appropriately, and having a large number of queries to respond to means that you need to be well-organised in order to deliver the best level of service. Furthermore, responding to customer queries may help with reach in the long term as this interaction creates a clear page-to-user relationship that is measured as part of Facebook’s algorithms.

The large pages we’ve studied actually have a lower question response rate (63%) when compared to smaller pages (69%). This is a factor which is crucial in our Socially Devoted studies, as the question response rate is hugely important for customer care.

It’s crucial to focus on customer care and set roles and responsibilities as described in the internal workflow section above. This will allow you to respond to queries quickly and efficiently.

Questions should be always answered publicly to display the willingness to help and answer. The only exception should be industries and cases where personal info is necessary. Answering the question of one fan publicly can help you build a stronger relationship with the other members of your audience. Every answer to the fan or follower is actually an advertisement and supports community development; seeing these engagements motivates people to share what they themselves have to say and builds friendly, supportive image. This is even more important for large pages as fans might feel insignificant in such a broad audience, and proving them wrong is a great brand-love building tool.

Deliver the Service Your Audience Expects

CUSTOMERS AREN’T SHY25 % of User Posts on Facebook Pages Are Questions

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It is important to create an open space where customer feedback is valued, even when unpleasant. Admins should moderate the comments, but be selective of what to delete, block, or hide. If the conver-sation escalates negatively, then the page should connect with the Fan directly and solve the problem. It is always better to explain everything publicly as deleting or pretending there is no negative feedback can cause a strong backlash.

Pages need to be prepared for negative feedback and define the kind of language or comments that are unacceptable and may cause users to be blocked from the community. Large pages, due to increased user activity, especially need “house rules” to be set up to set the boundaries of the communication.

There are three significant advantages to doing Social Customer Care:

1. Providing customer service where your customers demand it increases the value of brand to consumer relationships;2. Advertise your mission and values and manage your brand’s reputation;3. Steer the conversation.

We believe the key advantages above apply to all brands in all industries, making it crucial. It’s a form of advertising that breeds loyalty and conversions through conversation and care.

Note: numbers made not add up to 100 % due to roundingSource: Social Media Marketing University (SMMU), Feb 13, 2014

US Marketing Professionals Who Have a Strategy to Deal with Negative Social Media Posts

45 % of marketers currently have an effective strategy to deal with negative social media posts

25 % are working on getting a plan

23 % don’t have any kind of plan

8 % have a plan that doesn’t work

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With larger pages, it is even more essential to optimize your content to maximize your reach. Larger pages receive approximately 15 times the number of interactions of smaller pages, with the same applying to absolute engagement. However, in the relative engagement metrics, the data falls in favor of smaller pages, which is why larger pages need to try even harder to maintain strong performance.

Picture 8: In terms of content types, the volume splits remain the same between large and small pages in terms of post types (photos, links, statuses, videos). Photos are the most-engaging posts across both large and small pages.

Make your content go further, every time

2.867

likes

shares

1.056

Q1 - 2014

Picture 7: Regardless of page size, the distri-bution of interactions is very similar. Generally, posts published by admin gain 85% of likes, 10% of shares, and 5% of comments. This is actually a great opportunity for large pages, as shares are basically an amplification of the message beyond the fan base. And, as the absolute number of shares is higher, there is a bigger potential for the reach of the mes-sage and therefore, shares should be desired and shareable content should be the goal of successful communication.

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Socialbakers Analytics allows users to make insight-driven decisions. Focus on key metrics such as interactions (with a focus on more-valuable interactions such as shares), reach and the split between organic and paid, and shareability of your content to get a true understanding of it’s performance.No matter what industry, there are 3 general tips for creating content which helps to better performance of a page:

Emotions can boost the performance of a page – Dove’s Real Beauty campaign is a great example of positive emotions generated by content and leading to its virality; Inspiration. Strong, attitude-rich quotes inspire the audience and are often shared, always remember to keep them brand-relevant. Connect to real life. Include a status update about popular events. Be part of an excitement of a current event or trend by associating your brand with what’s hot.

All those tips work for pages regardless of size but especially for larger pages it is crucial to boost specific activity and use their full potential to amplify the message.

While the average fan growth rate is 17 times higher for large pages as compared to smaller pages, there is still a need to boost reach through Facebook’s paid advertising options.

Every page should be boosting organic reach through News Feed ads within Facebook, however this is even more important for large pages in order to generate further engagement, clickthroughs, and ROI.

Socialbakers Ad Analytics can help you to identify the best posts to promote based on organic reach. High levels of organic reach and engagement can help you identify the posts that will perform best if given the extra push of being promoted.

At this level of page size, a great tip is to use the automated post boosting and ad pausing capabilities that Socialbakers Ad Analytics provides. This allows you to automatically boost your top performing posts in terms of reach - particularly useful if you are producing a lot of content.

Using Facebook’s native paid ads to maximum effect

Picture 9: An example of the auto-boost trigger from Socialbakers Ad Analytics. This feature enables automatic post promotion at the moment when the posts reach a pre-set organic reach level. This ensures that you automatically capitalize on any strong engagement performance, quickly and efficiently.

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In conclusion, running a large page with over 200,000 fans presents a huge opportunity for brands, but one that has unique challenges attached. Ensure that you’re prepared for the challenges that lay ahead of your growing your page, and plan out your content optimization, post reach, internal workflow, and customer care to enable you to deliver the best social presence that you can have.

The key takeaways are to understand your audience, analyze and beat your peers and competitors, optimize your workflow, make your content go further, deliver good customer service, and use paid ads to the best effect. These six key tips will help you to manage your page and maintain and improve perfor-mance over time as your page continues to grow.

Conclusion