The Agorapulse Barometer gives Facebook page admins a look at how they’re doing against pages with similar fan counts. A quick look at your stats on this free tool usually leave admins wondering, “How can I get a better Facebook Barometer score?”
Let me give you some pointers that have worked for many other businesses on Facebook.
Frequency
Consider how many times per week you post from your page. Whatever you tell me, unless you get a ton of negative feedback, it’s probably too infrequent. Think of all the posts a typical Facebook user sees in her news feed. You are fighting for valuable real estate there.
Double the number of posts over the next month. Then return to the Facebook Barometer and see if your fans reached, engagement, and people talk about metrics improve.
Timing
You might “do social” from 9-5 in your time zone, but that might not necessarily be when the majority of your fan page is on Facebook. Look at your page’s Insights to determine where the lion’s share of your fan base comes from.
Now that you have a sense of your visitors’ location, give a thought to when they might be on Facebook. Might they turn to social media late at night? During lunchtime? If these times don’t work well with your work hours, consider scheduling your posts for times that your fans will most likely see them.
You can do this for each post directly on Facebook by using the built-in feature in the publish drop-down button.
If you use a social media management tool, try to use its “schedule post” feature more often based on your audience’s behavior and geography.
Post Quality
Though link posts seem to be the easiest type of posts, they might not necessarily get the most engagement. If you’re on Facebook, you know that you tend to pay attention to visual content. So why not share more short videos, photos, or animated GIFs to your posting mix?
If you have original content that is timeless (we marketers call it evergreen content), consider reposting it regularly. Again, fans’ news feeds are busy; they may not have seen it the first time. Or they might not have been a fan of your page the first time you posted it!
If you’re concerned about your negative feedback metric on the Barometer, make sure that you don’t repost evergreen content too soon after you posted it.
If you don’t repost evergreen content, determine whether your posts aren’t one sales pitch after another. People don’t go on to Facebook to be sold to—do keep that in mind! Try reducing your promotional posts by one-half for one month and see if that metric improves.
Your Ad Budget
Even if your post timing is impeccable and your content is prizeworthy, Facebook still does not let all your fans see your super-optimized content.
Facebook will let all your fans see your fine content if you’re willing to promote your posts. That means if you allocate advertising dollars for your post, it will most likely reach its full potential.
There are quick ways to promote your posts and there are super-targeted ways to reach a likely-to-engage audience. Inevitably, it’ll be up to you as to which approach you’ll take. But with a bit of advertising dollars behind your post, you’re bound to get more reach. And if that content is good, you should see your engagement and people talking about the increase of this number as well.
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