Facebook pages are an excellent place to advertise services and brands. Creating a page for your senior care organization raises awareness of your brand, your services, and your mission or goals. Likes are a great way to grow our potential and current community. But creating organic engagement with page activity—or grabbing attention without running an ad, “like” campaign, or boosting a post—can be very tricky.

Without an engaged, active community it can be tough to generate ROI. You may feel as though you’re wasting your time or the time of your marketing team. While we can garner valuable insights from how our audience interacts with (or doesn’t interact with) our posts, these can mean very little if we aren’t using that information strategically.

However, with a good plan and the right tools, we can dramatically increase our presence and interactions on Facebook and social media in general.

Engage to Engage

When you aren’t engaged, your audience certainly won’t be either. It’s important to remain active on your page; posting consistent, quality content is a key requirement if you want to raise awareness for your company. Posting from three times a week to once a day is recommended, but pay attention to your audience’s patterns—if you’re posting once a day and your likes begin to drop, you may be posting too frequently. Tweak your schedule to best fit your audience.

You can use Facebook Insights to target which times and days your audience is most active. Perhaps your older users are on Facebook in the early hours of the morning. Scheduling posts for when you know the bulk of your community will be online to see it is a great way to encourage reactions, shares, and likes on content. The more interactions your posts get, the more reach Facebook will give them.

facebook fans online

This table displays the times and days your audience is most active and can be found in the Posts section of Insights.

Be Sure Your Assets and Information Are Optimized and Accurate

Open your Facebook page or a page of one of your favorite companies. The first thing you see is probably one of two things: the profile picture or the banner image. You need to both capture attention and inform with these two assets. Using your logo (or some version of it) for your profile picture is best practice and informative; your audience knows they’re in the right place. Your banner image needs to be an engaging one in order to keep their attention. A high-quality image looks professional and authoritative. You can read more about high-quality photography in Good Photography Helps Ensure Your Senior Care Website Is the Picture of Health.

Your information is just as important as your assets. Customers need to be able to follow through on any questions or interest they have in your company. An accurate website, address, and phone number can help users contact you or learn more about what you do. You should review your information every quarter or so to keep things up to date.

Tout Your Page at Every Opportunity

Promote your Facebook page at every opportunity; in your printed materials, in your digital materials, in your email signature, on your website—any evergreen content you own should have a link to your Facebook page. For that extra step, add a Like button to your website or blog to take out the extra work for your potential audience.

Don’t Forget Your Current Customers

Your employees, your current customers, and even you (you didn’t like your own Facebook page?) are all valuable likes to jumpstart your page. While gaining likes from new users is an important goal, engaging your current customers is a vital part of customer retention. We don’t want anyone to feel like we’re throwing out the old for the new.

We can engage our current community by posting about current residents (remember HIPAA!), sharing photos from recent events, and sharing your community’s social calendar. These are just some of the great ways to ensure retention.

Learn from Data and Research

facebook post reach graph

Here we can see the organic reach of several scheduled posts; none were boosted.

Though we touched on this, learning from the Insights section is key to growth. The best way to learn more about your audience is to experiment. Try posting things on different days and at different times to gauge your reach. You’ll discover both times that work really well and times that don’t work at all. In the example above, you can see that a post made on December 21st, 2017, had an incredible amount of reach (organic).

There could be several factors behind why this post did so well; perhaps a lot of our audience was on vacation and cruising Facebook. Perhaps the New Year Resolution Bug hit—around that time of year, people are always looking for ways to change in the new year. It was made earlier in the morning, though we can see that other posts around the same time didn’t perform quite as well, which is worth noting. However, by tweaking our posts to go out in the afternoon (our 1:39 PM post a few days later gained 76 reach), we can see a decent uptick in reach.

Make Your Post Interactive

You’ll find out what kind of posts your audience loves to share or comment on, which can lead to new likes as your reach grows with continued engagement. Tailoring your post type to what your audience likes to see, be it news or feel-good stories, will dramatically increase post engagement and reach. Be sure to make posts interactive in some way. Give people something to comment about or to share! Asking an open-ended question at the end of a post can make all the difference.

Just remember that doing your research on your subject matter is important. If you’re posting information about a local event, can you tag another business, like a favorite caterer? Can you create a calendar event that your clients can share? Again, the more you engage, the more your audience will engage. Sharing posts from other businesses or commenting on them can also be a great way to introduce yourself to another set of demographics—some of which might be seeking services like yours! Cross-pollinating can be an interesting way to gain new customers.

Curious about how IlluminAge can help bolster your Facebook presence? Check out our EngAge program!
P.S: Like our Facebook page (see what I did there?)!