Dive News

A Facebook Page is relatively easy to set up – once you have taken the leap and signed up for your Facebook account.
Remembering, that if you register for a Facebook account and are wanting to represent yourself as an Instructor or Dive Center, you must have a personal profile and then create a Page – I talked about this in the post – You need a Facebook Page not a Profile

Once you have your page up and running, its time to start using it!

We are very lucky in one respect in regards to content.  Particularly in regards to keeping that content fresh and new – divers have a lot of fun and they take a lot of photographs – and video.  Nothing screams fun like a group of smiling divers. And we all want to part of a fun club – don’t we?

A well titled photograph can draw attention to your Facebook page and now that Facebook has opened up sharing of items, if the people who like your page really like your content, they can pass it on.

Adding links to new content on your site – trip reports for example – also keeps your Facebook page alive and encourages people to visit it more often. If there is not a lot happening out on, or under the water (hopefully due to the weather) talk about the team or what is happening in store.

The new Facebook Insights (Facebook statistics) are even easier to understand than before.

Insights can help you find out if people are actually looking at and sharing your dive photos and Facebook content… or whether you are talking to an empty room.

Take a look at the ‘People Talking About ” number on your Facebook Page.
This tells you how many people have clicked on your posts, liked, them, commented or shared your posts with their friends in the past 7 days.
If its really low – don’t panic! With a bit of effort and analysis you can improve this number.
This metric is a great indicator of how engaged your Facebook fans are – which in turn means they are more likely to recommend you to their friends, or buy trips and gear from your shop.

We are able to see pretty quickly what works and what doesn’t.
Take a look at each of the data for your posts on the Insights tab. Facebook tells you how many unique people saw your post in the 28 days since you posted  (Total Reach), how many people clicked anywhere on your post (Engaged Users), how many liked, commented, or shared your post (Talking About This), and the percentage of people who actually interacted with your post out of the eyeballs that saw it (Virality).

Try out different types of posts – dive photos, videos, asking questions, sharing links, polls etc.
Also try different times of the day, and different days of the week to see which times are best for interacting with your community. Page Insights can tell you how effective your posts were so you can fine tune!

Once you know which days that you get the most traffic – and for what type of content – you can have your special photographs, stories or new training courses ready for those days.

Check the Fans tab on your Insights page – in particular which posts generated more likes and also when Unlikes occurred.
If you see a blip in Unlikes, then take a look at the posts you did around this time as it may be irrelevant to your community. Also, if you did a lot of posts that week, this may have caused Unlikes as overposting by brands can be interpreted as spam! Less can be more….

Lastly, the Talking About tab on your Insights page will show you the demographics of the fans who are interacting with your page. You may be surprised by the age, gender or location of some of these people, and it is a great opportunity to tailor your posts to appeal to these people.

Remember that Facebook isn’t limited to the countries that we live in. If we were to compare, its one of the largest “countries” in the world.
Us divers are an international bunch. We love to travel and we love to welcome visitors to our countries so think about how you might entice people here or better yet, how you can get yourself elsewhere in the world to teach or even guide.

The users page in your Insights tells you where most of your “Likes” are from.
You can use this – and age range, sex etc to target a lot of your content towards those that use your Page a lot or to perhaps entice those that don’t.

A big thanks to my collaborator Simone McCallum.

Simone spends her days in the finance industry and her nighttimes working out how new and cool things operate so she can share information with us on her blog ( http://http://simone-mccallum.blogspot.com/ )
You can find Simone on Twitter ( http://www.twitter.com/simonemccallum )

I, Tara have two jobs – my favourite one – this one and some day job in Telecommunications where I am also a member of an Online Team looking after corporate social media.
If you have any questions, you can leave a comment, drop me a message via the contacts page or track me down on Twitter
( http://www.twitter.com/tarasutherland )