The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Note: This post is the fifth installment in a series of excerpts from the Insider's Guide To Facebook Pages, a white paper from Clickable. Download the full guide. For help with your Facebook marketing, contact us.

Acquiring fans is only the first step of creating a successful presence on Facebook. According to Mark Spangler at Stuzo, “Liking a page is just starting a conversation. Then, you have to determine through your consumer engagement strategy how you will continue the interaction and the dialogue with your users.” Brian Simpson at Vikram Chatwal Hotels agrees, “Just because you have a page doesn’t mean that people will flock to you.” First, you need to determine the frequency with which you add content to your page.

Official blogs might be updated as infrequently as every week or two, depending on how often you need to communicate news or views to your audience. Twitter feeds need to be updated far more frequently, but content producers are only on the hook for 140 characters at a time. A Facebook page falls somewhere in between.

Facebook Pages don’t need to be maintained as aggressively as Twitter feeds. On the other hand, posts to your Page should be somewhat detailed, but nowhere near as ex- tensive as a complete blog post. The specific frequency will depend on your business. According to T. J. Kelly, at Edelman, “When determining your posting schedule, you need to figure out what works best for your brand and your products.” Some brands update their pages every day; others update them less frequently. At most, you can wait two to three days between posts. In either case, you need content. Kelly again: “You can’t post every day unless you have enough truly relevant content.”

Before you launch your page, you need more than a policy for posting and moderating content: you need content. As Kelly explains, “You need to have a content strategy in place before you launch your page. Brands often get themselves into trouble in this way.”

To manage a successful Facebook Page, you will need a buffer of time that will allow you to create relevant content. To protect your brand, be sure to create the first two months of content before you launch your page.

To manage your Facebook Page effectively – that is, to acquire fans and maintain their interest – you need a progressive plan. Your posts and apps must build on one another and constantly create new reasons for fans to engage your brand. You can’t simply make disconnected updates. You have to tell a story, and that story needs to be at least two years long.

While multimedia offers like contests, surveys and polls can drive a significant number of Likes to your page, it is easy for Facebook users to dismiss them as one-offs. “The challenge,” according to T. J. Kelly at Edelman, “is to keep those fans engaged.” Doing so requires consistent and rich content. “People often don’t realize that this is a long- term strategy,” says Simpson at Vikram Chatwal Hotels. “Patience is going to pay off.”