Most MSP business owners understand the importance of Facebook for bringing in leads. But trying to keep up with posts and replies on a regular basis can be very time intensive.
If you only post occasionally, and don’t really do much to continually engage followers, then your Facebook page can easily collect dust and become a ghost town.
But there is so much potential there if followers are prompted to engage from time to time. How can you take advantage of the platform without it taking up so much of your time?
Use These Facebook Tips to Save Time & Build Page Engagement
It turns out that there are several ways you can put your Facebook page on autopilot (or at least mostly) and get it to continue engaging followers on your behalf without it being too time-consuming.
Now, I do want to start off by saying that you DO need to show up on your page once I a while. It’s important to directly engage with your followers. These tips will help you do it in a more time efficient way by picking up some of the slack when you’re busy running your IT business.
Let’s first look at why you want to put some time and effort into Facebook and keep followers engaged and coming back to your page.
Of all the social media platforms, Facebook is king. It leads all the others and has about 60.6% of all internet users on its site.
Users spend just shy of an hour a day (58.5 minutes) on Facebook daily on average. That’s a lot of time to promote your message to followers each week!
One more statistic that illustrates the importance of having a business presence on Facebook is that 78% of U.S. consumers have discovered retail products to buy on the platform.
Here are some of the things you can do to keep your Facebook Page engaging and attracting new followers without having to spend all your time monitoring your page.
Turn on Top Fan Badges
Top Fan Badges are a fun Facebook feature designed to reward people for interacting with a page. When people react to your posts through a “like,” or comment on or share your posts enough, Facebook will let them know they’ve earned a Top Fan Badge.
It’s a great way to make people feel good about your business, keep them engaged, and you can also see who your top fans are.
Another bonus is that all you have to do is turn the feature on, and Facebook handles the rest automatically. It will keep track of interactions, and after a few, notify your followers when they’ve earned their badge.
Turn on Top Fan Badges by:
- Go to your Facebook Page
- Click “Settings”
- Click “Facebook Badges” from the left menu
- On the page, move the “Turn on Top Fan Badges” to the ON position
Enable Instant Replies
Facebook is a great way to interact with people in real-time. They can send a message right to your page’s inbox – it’s like an alternate contact form. But when you’re working on an IT issue for a client, you can’t always be on Facebook ready to reply right away.
However, you can greet customers with a friendly message even if you’re not there by turning on Instant Replies. This allows you to automate a reply to a message that lets someone know you appreciate their note and will get back to them soon.
You can turn on Instant Reply for your Facebook Page by doing this:
- Click “Inbox” at the top of your Page
- Click “Automated Responses” in the left column
- Click next to “Instant Reply” below “Greet Customers” to turn Instant Reply on
- Click “Edit Message” to change your reply, and click “Save”
Automatically Post Content from Your Blog
This next tip automates a Facebook post from your WordPress site as soon as you post a new blog. So instead of having to manually post a link to your blog on social media, that step is done for you!
For this to work, you need to have two things:
- A WordPress website
- A plugin called Jetpack
Once you have Jetpack installed in WordPress, you want to use its Publicize feature. Go to the Settings and then Sharing. Click the toggle to activate “Automatically share your posts to social networks.”
You’ll then need to connect your Facebook page. You can also connect other social media accounts like LinkedIn and Twitter.
When you’re writing a new blog post, look for the green Jetpack icon at the top right of the edit screen. Under the “Share this post” section, toggle on Facebook and any other social accounts you want. You can also write in a custom message that will post with the blog link.
As soon as you publish the blog, it’s automatically posted on Facebook for you.
Use the Facebook Shop Feature
Have you thought about having an ecommerce shop for selling computers, phones, or other hardware but didn’t want to go through the whole set up on your website?
You can use the Facebook Shop feature on your Facebook page to add an online shop with checkout, giving your followers an easy way to shop new or refurbished hardware directly from your Facebook page.
You can review how to add it here. The basic requirements are:
- Sell physical items
- Agree to Facebook’s Merchant Terms
- Link to a valid US bank account
- Have a Tax Identification Number (TIN)
Once you have it set up, you’ve got a 24/7 salesperson working on social media for you!
Use a Facebook Messenger Chatbot
Marketing over Facebook Messenger has a 70% better open rate than email marketing. It’s estimated that over 20 billion messages between consumers and businesses are exchanged every month.
Setting up a Facebook Messenger bot allows you to automate marketing on Messenger. You can program in answers to simple questions as well as engage prospects with tailored, interactive content.
Many chatbots have templates that make it easy to get started. Here is a screenshot from ManyChat’s website that shows an example of how these bots can help you engage and cultivate leads – all automatically without you needing to be there live.
Here are some sites that offer Facebook Messenger chatbots:
Use a Social Media Scheduler
Many MSP business owners aren’t going to have time every day to come up with ideas to post to their social media, but they can find a chunk of time once or twice a month to schedule posts in advance.
Use a social media scheduling application that allows you to pre-schedule posts. Then you can just schedule an hour or two a month to come up with posts for each day and preload them. They’ll go out for you according to your schedule, helping to keep regular content posting to engage your Facebook followers.
You can try one of these popular scheduling apps:
Let a Curation Engine Find Content For you
One of the time-consuming tasks with keeping up a Facebook page is finding new content to share that followers will like and engage with. You don’t have to originate all that content yourself! You can use a curation engine to find great content for you that you can share based upon keywords.
If you follow the 5-3-2 social media rule, about half your posts can be content that you share from somewhere else. This takes half the heavy lifting off your shoulders when it comes to making regular Facebook posts.
The rule states that out of every 10 posts you make on social media:
- 5 posts should be curated content shared from somewhere else
- 3 posts should be relevant original content (but not “salesy”)
- 2 posts should be personal, “get to know us” style posts
What a curation engine does is go out and find that content for you and then makes it easy to share it directly to your Facebook page, automating the content creation process.
Here are a few social media content curating engines you can try:
Click to learn more about curating content for your MSP site.
Hire a Social Media Freelancer
If you really want to get the most benefit out of Facebook and other social media outlets, it takes regular posting and engagement with followers. It also takes a marketing strategy designed to build your follower count.
This could be another part-time job unto itself on top of what you do every day. Something most MSP’s just don’t have time for. But you can hire a professional for a fairly affordable price to do it for you.
Sites like Upwork, Fiverr, and Freelancer have tons of social media gurus that you can hire by the hour to take care of your social media engagement and help you grow your page leads and conversions.
Benefit from Facebook with Much Less time Investment
Using some automation tips for Facebook can help you keep followers engaged and drive new leads and followers.
What’s your favorite Facebook automation tip? Let us know in the comments!
