Facebook Feed Best Practices
This lesson will show you the best practices you can put in place when using Fan Finders in the Facebook News Feed. This is to ensure that your Fan Finder is optimized to get the most views and engagement.
Stop The Scroll
The first three seconds are the most important of any Fan Finder. We need to ensure that it is as engaging as possible and visually interesting enough to stop people scrolling in the news feed.
You can use Facebook’s ‘Trim’ tool to try different starting points so you can test what works the best with your audience.
Things to remember:
- If your song has vocals, it’s usually best to start the Fan Finder when the vocals come in, trimming any instrumental introductions the song may have.
- Don’t be scared to start the Fan Finder at the best bit of the song (usually the chorus).
Avoid Making Your Post Look Like An Ad
Every one in five posts is a sponsored advert on Facebook. This means that people are used to seeing hundreds of adverts in their newsfeed every day and, with the majority, ignoring them completely.
This is because subconsciously our mind focuses on what we care about (friends and family’s posts) and ignores the stuff we don’t care about (some terrible wish.com product). This means that we want to make the post look as little as a sponsored advert as possible and make it feel more organic.
This means I would avoid putting any links in the headline. For example, never post a 30 second clip with a link to the full video on YouTube.
Headlines
The headline is vital real estate on a Facebook feed post and will be the first thing that people see when scrolling down in the news feed. You want to make it feel organic. Think about how you or your friends would write a Facebook post and compare that to your post headline. We want to avoid things like talking about the artist in the 3rd person - for example: “Here is Taylor Swift’s latest song” would be a terrible headline. Don’t be scared of making big statements or appearing controversial - getting attention is of paramount importance.
We tend to see that the best headlines are one liners creating an open loop about the video itself:
- “With harmonies like this, who needs autotune?”
- “Is this the best pop punk chorus of the year?”
- "By the end, everyone in the room was tearing up..."
When to Post
If you're posting the Fan Finder to your page before you start running paid traffic to it, you need to think about what day and what time to post it. In terms of days in the week, try to avoid posting on weekends. If you are unsure, you can test your optimal timing with other posts before your Fan Finder to find out when your audience is most engaged.
The time of day that you post can also be very important and can have a big impact on your reach and engagement. We tend to see that 1PM, when a lot of people will be having lunch, and after 5PM when people are finishing school and work can be optimal times to post.
Comment Management
It is great practice to reply to every positive comment on your Fan Finder. You are rewarding and engaging people that have taken the time to comment on the post and you are also showing new people seeing the post that you are an engaged and nice person.
The same can be said for negative feedback. If you get into an argument with someone or even just leave a negative comment sitting there, it will impact how new people view you as an artist.
We would recommend just deleting any negative comments and moving on. It is simply not worth engaging them or ignoring them.
Inviting People To Follow Your Page
You can log into Facebook as your page and invite anyone that engages with your Fan Finder to ‘follow’ your page. This is a great way to increase your page followers without spending any money or being too pushy/ salesy.
Here’s how you do it:
- Open the Facebook App on your mobile device
- Press ‘Menu’ at the bottom right of the screen
- Select your artist page instead of your personal profile
- Press ‘Page’ at the bottom of the screen
- Find your Fan Finder and press the engagements
You will see a list of everyone that has engaged with the post and, in the right hand of the screen, you will see the option to ‘invite’. Pressing this for each person will send them an invite to follow the band/artist page.