By: Jeff Bullas, a Special to Overdrive

Before the rise of the social media age obtaining feedback negative or positive was restricted to private abuse over the phone, compliments in a personal email or a glowing testimonial in a letter. Today by giving your fans or opponents access to a Facebook page, blog comment box or a Twitter account, you can be praised or heckled in a matter of seconds. This is what scares the CEO or CMO who has grown up in a previous traditional world with limited and more discrete feedback! The upside is that a Facebook Page, Twitter and a Blog can provide you with instant feedback and keep you highly relevant in a connected social web that far outweighs the negatives.

I don’t know how many times I have a had conversations with executives about receiving real feedback about their brand. It scares them and many are still getting their heads around it!

10 Best Practice Tips For Facebook Publishing

These tips will help you increase your engagement and interaction with fans so that they will keep coming back and provide you with valuable feedback that will drive inquiry and sales and keep you on top of your market segment with real time comments.

1. Keep Your Posts Short

The news feed of your Facebook page typically contains a lot of information so having a good headline for your post and keeping the post length to less than 250 characters generates the more interaction and engagement. According to Facebook  posts of that length generate 60% more likes, comments and shares than posts greater than 250 characters

2. Post Photos, Videos and Quotes

We no longer live in a monochromatic 2 dimension world of  the Gutenberg press and the ancient world of the black and white TV. High definition photos and videos in graphic detail and vivid color provide engagement levels that far exceed plain and simple text.

Research shows that “Posts including a photo album, a picture or a video generate about 180%, 120%, and 100% more engagement than the average post, respectively“. What should also be kept in mind is that simple text that is in the form of a quote can drive high interaction!

3. Post Consistently

This is not an exact science but once a month is not going to cut it. Some brands and business can post several times a day but once a day is normally a good place to start. Educational or entertaining content will not be seen as oversharing or too promoting. A good rule of thumb is to have one marketing message for every nine to ten informational posts.

4. Ask for your Fans Opinions

You might be thinking about launching several new products and this will allow you to quickly crowd source opinion that may determine which one you actually manufacture or produce!

5. Ask Questions using the Facebook Questions App

Facebook has a native questions app that is very easy to use. You can find out what is important to people by asking questions of your customers and prospects of how you can improve your business. The interaction and vote can be as simple as one “click”

6. Try Posting “Fill in the Blank” Posts

If you want to give your fans a very simple way to engage with your post, ask them to finish your sentence. If you had a fashion brand you may want ask people a simple statement that requires them to finish off the sentence as to why they like it or how they use it.

Fill-in-the-blank posts generate about 90% more engagement than the average post.

7. Give Fans Access to Exclusive Information

This could be done by either breaking the news first on Facebook or providing special content such as a video or an article when they “like” your page.

8. Reward your Fans with Deals and Perks

You can use your Facebook “Page” to not just promote but distribute coupons or link to promotions.

9. Be Timely

Breaking news on Facebook that is relevant for your audience can drive more interaction and engagement. According to Facebook “posts mentioning Independance Day on July 4th generated about 90% more engagement than all posts published on that day”.

10. Localize your Posts if they are Relevant to a Specific Audience

Some of your posts might only be relevant for a subset of your fans. For example, if you are only making some products in specific countries, you might want to promote these products only to people in this country. When using the status button when you post to your News feed  you can send a post just to one country.(see screen shot below)

Use the geo-targeting feature to make sure that only the people who would find your post valuable will see it.