10 Creative Ways to "Level-Up" Your Presence on Facebook

I love Facebook—not only because it helps me remember when to wish my friends a “Happy Birthday,” but also because it has been an extremely effective tool for my brand.

For example, over the past year Facebook has overwhelmingly been the number one site for referral traffic to SPI:

Again, this is for traffic coming to the blog—not necessarily the method that new visitors have found out about me (which is, as I've recently found out, through my podcast). In fact, if you look across the row you'll see that Facebook actually has the lowest percentage in terms of new visits, at 19.05%.

This means that most of the traffic that comes from Facebook is returning traffic, which is important because it's one thing to get people to come to your site for the first time (and for some, that's the easy part), but it's a whole new ballgame trying to get those first time visitors to come back.

Over the past year, I've shared a lot of tips from my own experience about Facebook:

All of these tips are helpful for getting you up and running, but what about tips for interaction and engagement?

How about tips for keeping eyes on your brand and getting people to click through to your website?

That's what I'm going to share with you today.

Below are 10 creative ways to “level-up” or supercharge your presence on Facebook so that you can get more people involved in your brand, stay better connected with your readers and customers, get more traffic coming to your site and have Facebook become an integral part of your marketing campaign.

1. Post SOMETHING Daily

This goes without saying, but in order to have an active Facebook Page you as the owner have to be active on it too. If you truly want to integrate Facebook in your marketing campaign, the worst thing you can do is waste time setting up a page only to let it sit there like a wasteland.

I like to make sure I post something at least once a day, and I like to mix it up a bit too.

It literally takes less than a minute, so I always have time to do this every day.

If for some reason you can't spare a minute each day to post something new, you might consider checking out BufferApp, which I mentioned in a previous post for automating Tweets throughout the day, but they've just added Facebook to their repertoire and it works extremely well. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.]

2. Manually Post Links to Your Blog

There are tools and apps available that allow you to automatically post updates on your Facebook page that link to newly published posts on your blog—but I wouldn't recommend using them.

Manually posting links to new posts allows you to include a personal message along with your link and you can customize how the update will look on everyone's news feed too.

It's more personal this way.

I like to paste any links directly into my status update and then click on the Title and Description of the link that shows up and customize those too:

3. Purposely Insert an Attention Grabbing Picture That You Can Choose When You Post a Link

To add onto how important it is to manually post links on your Facebook page, you also have the ability to select the image that goes along with your link.

The image is extremely important because a person's newsfeed is full of random stuff that's fighting for their attention, and it's the thumbnails and images that stand out the most.

You can't add your own images via Facebook—you only get to select from the images that are embedded within the page you are linking too—but you can purposely include an interesting and eye-catching image within your blog post so that you can choose it when you post on Facebook.

4. Fill in the Blanks

One thing I love to do is ask people to fill in a blank.

It's a creative way to ask a question and seek engagement that mimics the idea of a telephone ringing—people just can't NOT answer it.

Plus, it's quick and easy for people to insert just one or two words into a comment, and it's also fun and easy to read everyone else's answers too.

5. Ask For Help

One of the things I love most about Facebook is that once you get a good number of Fans to like your page, it becomes a fantastic resource for your business.

People love to help out, so please don't hesitate to ask for it. It allows your audience to have a say, and more often than not some of your fans will have the answer you're looking for.

6. Share Something NOT About Your Business

If you really want to connect with your audience, share stuff that's not about your business from time to time.

Don't go overboard, obviously, but injecting a little bit of personality and non-business related stuff into your stream can do wonders.

It just makes you seem more real.

Plus, not everyone can relate to all of the niche-related things you post about, but people can definitely relate and connect with you more emotionally outside of your niche, for example:

7. Tell People to Post and Share Something About Them on Your Page

Managing a Facebook page for a brand, or any social media account, is all about building a thriving community.

And a community loves any opportunity to be heard, you just have to give them permission sometimes.

Instead of sharing something of your own all of the time, ask your audience to share something that they've done. Take it a step further, and ask them to share a link and you'll see that you'll get a lot of people who take that opportunity to do so.

8. Divert Questions from Your Blog to Your Facebook Page

This is something that I've done to both decrease the amount of emails I receive and increase the activity on my Facebook page (and the number of ‘likes' too).

On the contact page here on SPI, I share this:

Please note that due to the rapid growth of this blog, I receive over 100 emails a day from this contact form (I’m not kidding!), so please forgive me if I am unable to respond to your inquiry right away. If you’d just like to say hi, thanks, or have a quick question you don’t mind other people seeing, I would appreciate a quick message on my Facebook Page instead.

I love this, because:

I receive less emails.
There's more activity on my Facebook page.
I can provide shorter, more concise answers.
Other people can answer before me (which they do sometimes, and the community is often much better at answering questions than I am), or add onto the conversation.
The public may see questions answered that they had in their heads too.
People see that I'm active on my Facebook page (and other people are active too). In other words: massive social proof!

9. Share Links to Particularly Popular Updates

To get more fans, I'll often share a popular post on Facebook (one with a lot of comments, likes and social proof) on other social media platforms, like Google Plus and Twitter. This drives people from those platforms onto my Facebook Page. If they are new, they see my landing page first and more often than not a simple link on Twitter will equal 25-50 more fans in a heartbeat—especially if the Tweet is something magnetic and sharable.

To link to a specific post on Facebook post (and this took me forever to figure out), just click on the timestamp for that particular update to open up the new page, and grab the link from there. Your post page will look like this.

Hint: you can link to Facebook posts from your blog too—just like I did above.

Follow Up!

Last, but definitely not least: follow up with people.

After you leave updates or share videos, pictures or links, when people respond, respond back!

Have a real conversation with people on your page and you'll become so much more than a blog, a website, or a brand—you'll become a real person that people can actually talk to, connect with, and feel more comfortable subscribing to your list or possibly purchasing from you in the future. The more likely they are to care about what you say and follow your recommendation to check out a specific resource or click on a particular link back to your blog.

Of course, you can't reply and have a conversation with everyone, but when you reply or keep the conversation going everyone sees it (especially those who have liked or commented on that particular post, who get notifications when this happens) and it immediately helps you stand out from the rest.

Again, just remember—it's all about community. Not just on Facebook, but on any social media platform you're involved with.

It's like you invited all of these people to hang out, and you have to keep them entertained. It doesn't take much, but it takes something, and hopefully this list of things will help you out.

Cheers, and all the best to you!

(Editor's note: As of 2021, we’ve chosen to move our student course communities off of Facebook. As we strengthen our commitment to fostering strong community for the SPI audience, we believe that Circle is a better community platform for us. We launched our private membership, SPI Pro, on Circle in July 2020. We’ve had such a great experience that we decided to use Circle to host SPI Academy, a shared space for all of our course communities.)