Facebook Community Development: How to Cultivate Loyal Fans

Are you creating a fan base on Facebook?

Want to discover how to engage your audience via pages and groups?

To explore how to nurture a community on Facebook, I interview Holly Homer.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode, I interview Holly Homer, a professional blogger whose Kids Activities Blog helps parents discover fun things to do with their kids. Her Facebook page (Quirky Momma) has more than 3 million fans.

Holly shares how she's cultivated a thriving community using Facebook.

You'll discover how Holly uses Facebook Insights to develop her content.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Facebook Community Development
The Importance of Community

Community is the key to performing well in the algorithm-driven world of Facebook.

To serve the community of Kids Activities Blog and the Quirky Momma Facebook page, all of the content focuses on the people who make up that community. Those people are mostly moms (plus the occasional dad, grandparent, or teacher) who are looking for something to do with their small children and survive the day.

Whether that content is a video, picture, or saying, it needs to help the community and bring people closer together.

When Holly began blogging 10 years ago, the community developed via comments on her personal blog, June Cleaver Nirvana, as well as comments she made on her friends' blogs. A popular blog post might attract 300 visitors and 150 comments. Holly recalls that commenting made this community visible and close-knit.

When social networks came along, Holly says she had to relearn how to establish community, so she steered the conversation from comments onto Facebook because that's where comments and engagement were happening. She had to tell her community where she would be engaging and eventually turned off the comments on her blog.

Facebook Live changed Holly's community again. She says she can now talk directly to her fans, but Facebook Live allows her to have more of a two-way conversation and be a participant rather than the center of her community.

Listen to the show to hear Holly's advice for maintaining a community as social media changes.

Facebook Insights

Holly is a bit of an analytics geek and uses Facebook Insights learn about her community and what they like. With Facebook Insights, Holly can learn what common traits her community shares (they're typically moms with small children), where they live (mostly the United States and Australia), when they're online, and what they do online.

Holly says she can also see what types of content her community likes (such as photos, links, or videos) and even what kinds of links or videos attract the most engagement. What Holly learns in Facebook Insights helps her decide what type of content brings her community together.

In Facebook Insights, Holly says she mostly focuses on the magical orange bar. This bar shows each post's reach in comparison to other content for that day or other content on the page. (You find the orange bar by clicking More under the list of posts to get a whole page of posts and then looking in the fifth column.)

Holly says her team knows that if the orange bar is short, don't repeat that content. If the orange bar is long, try to figure out how to repeat the performance of that successful content. For Holly, a short orange bar doesn't mean that the proverbial algorithms didn't like some content. It means her fans didn't like the content. She says every single interaction on your page is a vote for more of that content.