PAINFULLY OBVIOUS, BUT EXTREMELY EFFECTIVE FACEBOOK TACTICS

Sometimes, you just need to point out the obvious! On any given day, an average Facebook user’s news feed filters around 1,500 possible stories. But after Facebook’s news feed algorithm comes into play, only 20% of these stories actually land in your feed. In fact, I’ve heard that it’s easier to get into Harvard than into someone’s Facebook news feed!

You’ve read thousands of articles that tell you the same Facebook tactics. Use photos, they say. And be sure to ask questions. Oh – and post at an optimal time. Rinse and repeat and you’re on your way to being a social media superstar. Right?

If you work in the social space, you’ve heard these generic tactics time and time again.

Social media marketing is about the little details. This post isn’t telling you to post a photo or ask a question. It’s here to tell you to dig deeper, analyze and make small changes that can make a big impact. Below you will find a collection of data-driven Facebook engagement techniques that will help you cut through the noise of your fans’ busy Facebook feeds.

1. Yes, Image Posts Drive Engagement – But Choose Your Images Carefully

You’re probably thinking – you just told us this post isn’t going to be about driving engagement with photos. And it isn’t. Most of you know that images perform well on Facebook and have been leveraging image posts to drive engagement & click-throughs for quite some time. So we aren’t going to throw out a generic statement surrounded with some stats telling you to use photos.

You’re a smart marketer and you know images and larger images drive more engagement, but the real question is: which images, more specifically, can drive engagement?

Make Your Image Speak for Itself. Post pictures that are meaningful without having to read any text next to it. Posting a stand-alone, self-explanatory image outperforms a photo that needs additional explanation in the description. The image above demonstrates their findings. On the lefthand side, the image needs a caption to make sense, while the photo on the righthand side already tells the story.

2. Steal Ideas From Your Other Channels

Discovering what will perform well on Facebook can often be right in front of you. This is another tactic that seems very obvious, but it doesn’t get mentioned. Nobody says it out loud.

If you have a blog post your audience is raving about on Facebook, try and turn it into a series on Facebook. Look at what performs well on your other social media channels and think of how you can incorporate it on Facebook. Maybe it’s a quote that you tweeted that received a lot of response, maybe it is a stat from an interesting industry study that was well received in your community. Oftentimes they can be turned into a weekly series or a monthly campaign.

3. Hashtags Are Cool If You Use Them Properly

Everyone is excited that hashtags have finally come to Facebook, but most people don’t get that they aren’t used in the same way as they are on Twitter. There is even a Facebook page dedicated to the cause entitled, ‘This is not Twitter. Hashtags don’t work here.’

Simply Measured said it and a recent EdgeRank Checker study reported the same thing. Both studies found that Engagement per Facebook fan decreased with hashtags and Facebook posts with hashtags had less viral and organic reach, on average, than posts without hashtags.

On Twitter, hashtags act as a search tool helping users discovered content and shared interest which is aimed to increase the posts’ viral reach. And like we stated, on Facebook, users just aren’t treating hashtags the same way. Facebook users are the root of the problem as they are conditioned to scroll through their news feed to receive information versus search for information.

When you are using hashtags on Facebook, think carefully about what you are using them for and how you can use them. If your intent is to increase virality and reach, you might not receive the outcome you were hoping for.

Instead think of hashtags on Facebook as a way to express an emotion or sentiment (somewhat like an emoticon, which we will talk about below) a campaign or contest which allows you to unify your posts, promote across different platforms and depending on the nature of the campaign or contest, has the ability to encourage users to share their own posts with the hashtag of the campaign

Cricbuzz, the fastest commentary website for major cricket matches, uses the hashtag #facepalm. You may or may not know a ton about cricket or the context of the post below, but the hashtag didn’t act as a search term in an attempt to increase reach & virility, rather it expressed an emotion.

The strongest and most common power of the Facebook hashtag is its ability to link cross-platform with a campaign or contest. With the #PSL (Pumpkin Spice Latte) campaign coming to an end, Starbucks just launched their #sharejoy red cup campaign. The campaign is present on multiple platforms, encourages people to hashtag #sharejoy with their red Starbucks cup and ultimately increases their brand.

4. Not All Emoticons Are Equal :D

According to AMEX OPEN, using emoticons increases comments by 33%. The fact they increase engagement makes sense since their very definition ties into and derives from social media. It seems silly, but these two, sometimes three character expressions have played a significant role in communication through technology.

Buddy Media says posts with emoticons receive 52% higher interaction rates and have a 57% higher like rate, 33% higher comment rate and 33% higher share rate. Emoticons, when used properly and sparingly, can be a great way to express your tone and humanize your brand.

And get this, not all emoticons are equal. This graph from Buddy Media shows the interaction rate across each emoticon with :D coming out on top.

5. If You Are Asking a Question, Ask it at the End

See what we did there ;) ?

According to KISSmetrics, questions receive 100% more comments than standard text posts. And you’ve most likely heard it before: when it comes to engagement, especially comments, asking a question on Facebook is very effective. But we aren’t here to tell you tactics you already know. It isn’t about asking a question. It’s about where to ask that question.

According to a research study by Buddy Media, if you are asking a question, where you place the question in the post is equally as important as what you are asking. Posing a question at the end of your post increases the interaction rate by 15% and will double the comment rate compared to those with a question asked in the middle of the post. A question that is placed at the end of a sentence is asking your Facebook fans to respond immediately. When you ask a question at the beginning or in the middle of your copy this distracts your fan from answering the question.

The example below, although hyperbolic, shows the engagement spike when you pose a question at the end of your Facebook description. So the next time you type a question in your Facebook description pay close attention to the placement of your question in your copy.

Does placing a question at the end of your sentence increase your engagement? What type of images does your community respond to? Which type of emoticon, if any, increases engagement? How do people use hashtags and how can you leverage them to make them more effective? The devil is in the details when it comes to Facebook marketing. Not all these tactics will work for you, but remember, it’s important to dig deeper, analyze and implement & experiment with small changes that can drive engagement and make a bigger impact.

Do you have any Facebook engagement tactics or insight? I’d love to hear them in the comments.

EMPATHY INSTEAD OF SYMPATHY

Empathy is the most important skill you can practice. It will lead to greater success personally and professionally and will allow you to become happier the more you practice.

The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.

Why Practice Empathy?

Why should you explicitly work to enhance your ability to empathize with others?

-You will be more likely to treat the people you care about the way they wish you to.

-You will better understand the needs of people around you.

-You will clearly understand the perception you create in others with your words and actions.

-You will understand the unspoken parts of your communication with others.

-You will better understand the needs of your customers at work.

-You will have less trouble dealing with interpersonal conflict both at home and at work.

-You will be able to accurately predict the actions and reactions of people you interact with.

-You will learn how to motivate the people around you.

-You will more effectively convince others of your point of view.

-You will experience the world in higher resolution as you perceive through not only your perspective but the perspectives of those around you.

You will find it easier to deal with the negativity of others if you can better understand their motivations and fears. Lately when I find myself personally struggling with someone, I remind myself to empathize and I immediately calm myself and accept the situation for what it is. You will be a better leader, a better follower, and most important, a better friend.

How to Practice

Here are a few ideas on how to develop your empathy.

Listen

Listen intently when people speak to you. Conversations, especially regarding heated topics, often form a rhythm of back and forth speaking, with each party starting a point just before the conversation partner has ended his or her point. I'm sure you will recognize this pattern in yourself if you think about it. Before whoever is speaking has finished, you have already formulated your response, and you can't wait to spit it out.

Next time you find yourself in a conversation like this, slow down. Force yourself to listen to the words you're hearing. Consider the speaker's motivation behind saying what he or she is saying. Consider the life and work experience that has led to his or her current world-view.

Respond visually and with sound ("ah", "oh", "ya?") but allow at least a second to pass before responding verbally. Ask followup questions to better understand what the speaker intended or how they feel before you respond with your own opinions. Hopefully you'll need more time before you speak, because you've been too focused on the speaker to start preparing your response.

Watch and Wonder

Put down your cell phone. Instead of checking Twitter or reading articles while you wait for the train or are stuck in a traffic jam, look at the people around you and imagine who they might be, what they might be thinking and feeling, and where they are trying to go right now. Are they frustrated? Happy? Singing? Looking at their phones? Do they live here or are they from out of town? Have they had a nice day? Try to actually wonder and care.

Know Your Enemies

Maybe "enemies" is an exaggeration here, but think about a tense, preferably ongoing dispute you have with someone. Maybe it's a co-worker in a competing faction for how you should do some critical part of your work. Maybe it's a family member you're constantly warring with for some reason. Whoever it is, you're used to them being wrong and you being right. You tend to even jump to disagreeing with them regardless of what they are arguing for, because you are on opposite sides of the war.

Now imagine the entire situation from that person's point of view. The person is probably not evil or an idiot. They might not even be wrong about whatever it is you disagree about. In my own life, the problem is usually more of a fundamental philosophical difference than about the specific conflicts that occur.

How does this person feel about how you respond to them when you disagree? What fears cause the other person to be tense and hard to reason with? How do you exacerbate those fears rather than calm them? What valid arguments could this person make against your views and your handling of the situation? What good intentions does this person hold? What are the positive motivations behind what you perceive as a negative outcome? Do you agree with the motivations? If so, are they more important than the specific conflict?

If you're like me, just going through this exercise (maybe a couple of times with the same subject) can greatly reduce your frustration and anxiety over some of the most stressful inter-personal situations. It may sound obvious, but doing it is very different from understanding how it could work.

Choose the Other Side

While talking with Kelly about practicing empathy, she had a great idea. It's hard to side with your own "enemy" as I suggested above. It requires a forced third person perspective, which takes a lot of discipline when you're thinking about your own stress and emotions.

So to make it easier, try it as an actual third person. We all have friends and loved ones that complain to us about how they have been treated by other people. It's human nature to complain and it's the duty of a loved one to listen sympathetically. The assumption is that the listener is on the side of the complainer. A supportive friend or loved one almost always is, instinctually.

Try practicing (internally) taking the opposing view point. Don't go with your default reaction immediately. Start on the other side and work your way back. This reminds me of a cool technique Dave Thomas blogged about several years (almost 11 years ago, wow!) ago called debating with knives. It's an exercise which forces you onto both sides of a debate to help open your mind to the realities of the topic under discussion.

This is probably all obvious, but I doubt many people really practice empathy. I hope you will give it a try, even for a short while, and I hope it improves your life and the lives of those around you even if just a little.

This video explains the difference between empathy and sympathy