About Face[book]: Content is Queen

Once you’ve established your goals for your Facebook page, the next step is to post content that accomplishes your purposes. Keep in mind the three “somethings” as you type out your 420 characters for your friends to read. Will you want them to do something, think something, and/or feel something?

Kivi Leroux Miller from NonProfit Marketing Guide.com has some positive marketing tips that can work well for your personal and ministry FB pages. She suggests letting the 3 G’s influence your content:

Be Genuine: This is where your personality can shine through and you can build up that rapport that makes people love your cause. Think about whether the post helps your core fans/friends to really understand you better and to see your personality.

Be Generous: It’s all about being a helpful human. The story isn’t about you. It’s about being helpful to your supporters, friends, etc. Give them stuff that helps them in some way. This includes resources from other organizations.

Be Grateful: Being grateful is what you do in response to generosity from others. You can say “Thank You” directly or you can go the “actions speak louder than words” way and share a link, retweet, or otherwise pass on information from others who have been kind to you, as a way of saying thanks.

What to Write

• Entice people with questions (how/why questions are the most shared) Ask for advice with a question posed: People love to give their advice.
• Conjure an air of mystery: Posting an update that is mysterious leaves your FB friends asking for more. “In 5 more days…”
• Keep your kids’ stuff to a minimum. You are interesting, you know.
• Don’t think too hard on what to say; just be succinct.
• Give them something…a recipe, a link, a video, a new tune
• Give users a specific call to action. Directly ask people to “like” or “share” the post if they, too, enjoyed or agreed with what you posted.
• Encourage Shares/Mentions.
• Create polls to get people to interact.
• Put fans in charge: post 3 photos and ask them to vote on the best.
• Reward you loyal followers: re-post photos they submit; give a shout-out, etc.
• Be witty in your wording, twist a phrase, use a song/movie/book title to express your thought.

Discuss Topics People Love

These are topics that have a proven track-record for getting a response.

• Music: bands, songs, etc
• Chocolate
• Current disasters
• Current sporting events
• Seasonal changes
• A cause you’re passionate about
• Gifts you’ve received or given
• What you should be doing instead of posting on FB.

(Gentle Reminder: All these topics are enhanced because you have the international locale to draw from.)

Your adventurous spirit of living the cross-cultural life will lend itself to posting some interesting topics that are new to your audience—stateside or living in another culture. Even posting something as simple as “Received this from my next door neighbor” along with a photo of the unusual cultural gift is captivating to those of us living in the land of Walmart and Target.

You must believe there is nothing mundane about the life you are living overseas. So start sharing it with brevity. I’d love to know what kind of chocolate you can get in Turkey. Have you found some cool music in your country of service? Oh, and don’t forget to link us out to funny videos, passionate news stories and clips, stirring photos and all things that creatively show your cross-cultural life.

Next week: Maximizing your FB presence to enhance the "cause you are passionate about."