132: Do we Stink at Facebook? Hear what Maggie Frank-Hsu has to say! Brilliant Facebook Strategy

On today’s show, we’re shaking things up a bit. Rather than grilling a guest with questions, we are the ones in the hot seat! Can we take the heat?! You'll have to listen to find out :)

We're chatting with Maggie Frank-Hsu, a content marketing and social media consultant. Maggie and Beth Anne met at Social Media Marketing Day in San Diego, and they bonded over a mutual love for social media along with agreeing that, "hey, this motherhood thing is really hard!"

They've been grabbing coffee and chatting all things business ever since. 

Since Maggie really knows her stuff when it comes to social media, we decided to be a little bit vulnerable today. We gave Maggie complete reign to tear us apart when it comes to our Facebook strategy. "Throw us the book!" we told Maggie, and she kindly obliged.

(In all honesty, Maggie is super sweet! We knew we were in good hands!)

On The Podcast

02:00 - Facebook Growth to Over 200K
03:24 - Without a Goal, What's the Point?
05:10 - More Than A Like
07:34 - 3 Questions to Ask for Perfect Posts
11:40 - Avoid That Tempting Cute Kitten!
14:57 - One and Done!
17:58 - A Brilliant Visual for the Perfect Post!
22:55 - How to Create an Insane Amount of Content in a Tiny Amount of Time
25:05 - Our Secret Weapon
29:50 - An Important Reminder about Facebook Ads
31:35 - Put Yourself in  Their Shoes
34:12 - How Often Should you Post?
41:11 - How to Ride a Trend while Maintaining your Brand

Press Play on the Podcast Player Below to Learn Brilliant Facebook Strategy from Maggie!

Facebook Growth to Over 200K

Maggie lives in San Diego with her husband and 15-month-old son. Originally from the East Coast, she has spent the better part of her professional career working in NYC and Charlotte, North Carolina. Trained as a journalist, Maggie took a job at a startup and eventually found herself working in marketing.

Maggie took the position of Social Media Manager with a nonprofit called Understood.org. There, she was heavily involved in strategy building leading up to the organization's launch. During her time in that role she was able to garner wide visibility for that group’s Facebook page and grow it to over 200,000 engaged fans.

Maggie now works as an independent consultant for small business owners - helping them connect with their ideal customers and reach their goals when it comes to social media.

Without a Goal, What's the Point?

While this episode focuses exclusively on our Brilliant Business Moms Facebook page, much of what Maggie will discuss can apply to many different social media channels. (Just bear in mind the unique nuances of each as you implement these tips yourself.)

Before we dig in, Maggie wants us to remember that there's a clear distinction between what we do on social media with our personal accounts and how we use it for business. Often, new business owners forget this or get confused. But there are clear differences that we should keep in mind.

Personal Use of Social Media

• Is about maintaining a certain persona
• We're presenting a certain version of ourselves to the world.
• We collect and curate any and all content that we deem interesting enough to share.

Business Use of Social Media

• Social media use should be directly tied to business goals
• Social media use is about revenue generation
• We generate revenue with social media by first getting more potential customers interested in our product or service.
• We should have specific measurable goals such as clicks through to our website or email subscriber growth.

More Than A Like

Currently, our Brilliant Business Moms Facebook page has 4500 likes. (Yay! Thank you for being awesome fans!) Likes are often the first metric people look to when determining the success of a Facebook page.

But Maggie says number of likes don’t actually tell much of the story. Some people may ‘like’ your page once, but promptly forget about you. And with Facebook’s algorithm, we know that the vast majority of your fans won’t see your content.

Others may like your page, but never engage with your content. That’s why Maggie says engagement metrics are far more telling. To encourage those of us with smaller numbers, a page with not many ‘likes’ could still have tons of engagement!

3 Questions to Ask for Perfect Posts

A great strength of the BBM Facebook page is that it isn’t salesy. If you’re only using Facebook to push product, you may want to rethink your strategy.

Imagine how those sales-heavy type posts are perceived by your audience. People are usually scrolling through their newsfeed in quick bursts of time, like waiting in line at Starbucks. Under these conditions, users are looking for content that catches their eye quickly and will pique their interest to read later. They don’t want a virtual megaphone in their face.

Your purpose behind sharing content on Facebook shouldn’t simply be to “get people to see your page.” Instead, craft every post you share on Facebook with a specific end goal in mind.

Maggie shares tips for developing the type of posts your audience will like:

• Ask your customers what types of posts they enjoy.
• What pages do your customers follow? What do they like about those pages?
• What are some interests from your ideal client?

Avoid That Tempting Cute Kitten!

It is tempting to post content solely to get a response from your audience. (Gosh, we love those likes and comments!) But while posts should resonate with your audience, they must be related to your business too. It's difficult to draw in your ideal customer if your posts are all over the place.

Pictures of cute kittens are often popular on personal newsfeeds, but that doesn’t mean you should necessarily share a photo of your cat Whiskers on your business page.

One unique way to bridge this gap is to try out interactive Facebook posts on your business page. Maggie liked this post Sarah shared recently.

This post drew in our audience and created a space for conversation and connection. Because our brand is partially driven by personality (we want our audience to get to know each other) this post did really well. The bottom line is to be organic with personal-type posts and not abuse them for the sake of a like.

One and Done!

Most business owners simply want to run their businesses, not engage in social media marketing. Brilliant Business Moms is a unique hybrid because part of our business is sharing social media marketing tips! However, as more solopreneurs enter the marketplace, social media marketing is going to have to be a part of their business model.

If you’re intimidated about carving out time for Facebook in your packed schedule, Maggie suggests creating a posting calendar and scheduling out posts. You can do this in one block of time using services like Buffer and Tailwind, or simply using Facebook Pages’ built-in scheduler. The key is to be consistent, and following a calendar is a great way to ensure consistency!

I just love how strategic and thoughtful Maggie is with social media. Be sure to grab her Guide - 3 Tips for Using Social Media to Find Customers.

A Brilliant Visual for the Perfect Post!

Maggie created a Venn diagram visual to help business owners identify the type of Facebook posts (really, any content!) they should be creating. Circle A includes ‘Problems Your Ideal Client is Googling’ and Circle B includes ‘What You Feel Like You Could Write About Forever’.

In our case, Circle A would be topics we often see in our Facebook group:

• How to balance staying home with kids and getting work done.
• How to grow a business with limited time.

Circle B would be topics like:

• How to use social media to build your business.
• The ins and outs of small business taxes.

What’s the intersection of these two? Our favorite mamaprenuers are interested in getting the most out of their time, and we’re interested in helping them build their business!

That means we should be writing content like:

• How to use Pinterest in the most time saving way to build your business.
• Organizing your business finances in 5 minutes a day

Maggie noticed the recent share of our Tailwind affiliate link on Facebook as a teachable moment. Rather than simply sharing the link, as we did, Maggie suggested we could have written a blog post entitled ‘How Tailwind Saves You Time And Gets You More Customers’. That title would have been highly specific about the benefits of Tailwind to our audience, and probably would have gotten that Facebook post more engagement.

How to Create an Insane Amount of Content in a Tiny Amount of Time

The great thing about Circle B ‘What You Feel Like You Could Write About Forever’ is that it will be very easy for you to create a lot of content in a concentrated amount of time.

Plan For Creating an Insane Amount of Content in a Tiny Amount of Time:

• Think of as many blog or video titles as you can. (Maggie says shoot for 30.)
• Choose about 10 or so and schedule out when you want to publish that content. (You could use the Editorial Calendar in our Brilliant Business Planner!)
• Write an outline for each of the 10 topics.
• When you have a free afternoon, start typing!
• If video is more your speed, it only takes a moment to pick a place with good light in your house and set up your smart phone camera.
• Once your content is ready to go, prep and schedule the posts to go live according to your calendar.
• Pat yourself on the back, way to go mama!

Our Secret Weapon

Thanks to this podcast, we already have weekly content creation built into our schedule.

How would content sharing look if we were to apply Maggie’s strategies?

Maggie mentioned this Facebook post from December 29th sharing our interview with Danielle Arran. This particular post was a straightforward share of our content. Nothing super complex.

What if we were to use Maggie’s Venn diagram? How would that look?

Actually, in a January 6th post we unknowingly did what Maggie described! Same principle, we shared this blog post from our Blab with Crystal Paine, but with a twist. Victoria asked a question that fell into Circle A, “As a working mom, did you ever struggle with feeling less-than professional?” And we, through Crystal, were able to provide the answer. And, as it turns out, we did see much more interaction from that post ‘How To Balance A Business & A Baby...Without Going Insane!’

If we were to repeat this process every time we shared a podcast episode, we would not only likely have more fun creating content, but we would probably see more engagement.

So, how could we rephrase Danielle Arran’s episode? Like this: “You Asked How To Grow Your Email List, and Danielle Arran Has The Answer!” Maggie’s advice is that there is power in explicitly stating a problem and how you intend to solve it.

Another great tip Maggie had is to pull quotes from our podcast conversation to create even more posts and shareable graphics. Great idea! We need to get on that one...

An Important Reminder About Facebook Ads

These strategies sound great, right? While the tips Maggie shared are excellent best practices to optimize your Facebook page, they aren’t the end of the story. Facebook isn’t really free. The social media network clearly favors those who are willing to invest in advertising. But, for a paid ad to be successful, Maggie still reminds us that you should clearly know what you want to get out of your post.

If we were to write a blog post about Tailwind saving time, as Maggie suggested, we could put money into advertising with specific target goals. Maybe we want to target previous visitors to our site or women ages 25-35 with children. Facebook ads can be great, but only if you have a very specific business goal in mind.

Put Yourself in Their Shoes

Maggie brought up a great point when it comes to sharing on Facebook. As a business, we often share while we're on our business page. We're seeing all of our past posts, and clearly, we intimately familiar with what Brilliant Business Moms is all about.

But that's not how a Fan of our page sees things. We have to put ourselves in the shoes of the woman holding her phone, waiting in line at Starbucks. (Venti half-caff caramel macchiato, please!) If a fan likes your page months ago, but has never interacted with you, chances are they don’t remember the details about your brand.

For that reason, Facebook posts should be self-contained. You want each post to carry a bit of your personality, to be distinctively marked by who you are. Profile and cover photos should clearly include your product or service. Since you don’t have control over who is seeing your posts, you have to pretend as if it’s everyone’s first time being acquainted with your brand.

How Often Should you Post?

For a business our size, we wanted to know how often we should be posting to our Facebook page. Once a day? Twice a day? Maggie surprised us a bit and doesn’t buy any advice that says you should post a specific number of times a day.

She figures that we actually don’t know a whole lot about Edgerank, Facebook’s algorithm that determines who sees what content and when. If we were to be posting multiple times a day, even our most loyal fans may not even notice. (Maggie cited this article from Slate.com by technology writer Will Oremus.)

Maggie suggests simply experimenting to find the perfect posting schedule for your business. Try out a souped up posting schedule for a few weeks, then evaluate:

1. Is that posting high frequency worth the effort?
2. Are you seeing measurable results? (More or less interactions?)

You have to decide if the increased time is worth it.

Ultimately, consistency is key. If you’re just getting the hang of Facebook, choose a posting frequency that you can certainly manage and go from there.

How to Jump on a Trend while Maintaining Your Brand

Maggie used the example from her Understood.org days. Back when the Black vs. Blue Dress controversy went viral, the editorial team at Understood.org wrote a blog post about percecptions of people with learning and attention issues tangentially related to the viral phenomonen.

In the Facebook post sharing that blog, Maggie made sure that the post presented Understood.org’s vision and purpose. That particular post did very well because it caught onto an idea, albeit a momentary one, its audience was interested in (the Blue/Black dress) and intersected it with the core vision of Understood.org.

Maggie recommends using and referencing hot trends, but only you can tie it back to the core of your business.

Don't forget to grab Maggie's Guide: 3 Tips for Using Social Media to Find Customers

Stay in Touch with Maggie!

Site: MaggieFrankHsu.com
Pinterest: Maggie Frank-Hsu
Twitter: Maggie_FH
LinkedIn: margaretmaggiefrank