How To Help Your Friends with Social Pages

So your good friends owns a small business locally, and (since you're an awesome friend!) you want to do everything you can to help increase their traffic, and subsequently their brand visibility.

Well there is a lot you can do to help their page(s) grow! In fact, a few warm recommendations from you go a long way!

It's easy enough to like every one of their posts, but is that really enough? No. Not really.

In fact, just "liking" a facebook status update, photo or event isn't enough to get the ball rolling, same goes with "favouriting" a tweet. When considering how to best boost traffic for a friend's (or your own) page, the best way is to consider the Facebook EdgeRank system.

Here's what it looks like broken down in a fairly simple formula:

(click to enlarge)

(And you can go here if you'd like to learn more about exactly what EdgeRank is!)

So, considering the EdgeRank system, how do we best interact with these pages to ensure our other friends see the story in their news feed?

1) The more interaction, the better! -- Liking a page is good, but make sure you do more than that. Comment on a status update, Share a photo. How you interact means more than when you interact (Weight) so try to remember this:

A Comment weighs more than a Like

A Share weighs more than a Comment

A Comment & a Share weigh the most of all!

2) Make sure you're up to date -- Although you may think reviving an older post would be nice to do, because of the "decay" aspect of the EdgeRank algorithm it makes more sense to promote newer posts as they're more likely to be re-posted.

3) Share the most valuable content first! - I'm not talking about gold buying ads here, I'm talking about stuff that is actually good content. The real shareable things, that when you post them to your wall, your friends are most likely to comment on & repost again!

4) Calls To Action! - Don't let the sharing & engagement stop with you, think about it from a social marketing perspective and when you re-post the content, create a "call to action" (ex. "I just LOVE this thought from Crawl The Line... what do you think about her style of parenting? Leave a comment below!") -- This type of call to action tells people exactly what you want them to do and doesn't leave it open for interpretation.

I hope this helps you help your friends! :)

Sincerely,

The Social Mom