The past week I’ve made a renewed effort to use Facebook after listening to an instructional session Amy Porterfield gave at our Pro Blogger Training Event this week.
The Digital Photography School Facebook Page is one I keep up to date daily with new content (and it’s pretty good in terms of participation and driving traffic). Based on Amy’s lessons (you can hear her teaching in the video ticket), I thought it was time to experiment, and this week, I’ve played with a couple of different types of status updates on our page.
Image Posts
I’ve always known that pictures are gold on Facebook and have experimented with status updates using images from a blog post, and the link is included in the description. But, as it turns out, I’m lazy and sometimes end up simply adding a link to the status update section and letting Facebook draw the image from the blog post.
This week, I decided to get my fingers out, get off the lazy, and try several kinds of image updates. While doing this, I realized that the “good” results we’d previously seen using Facebook by taking small pictures from our posts meant we were actually in the wrong place click here.
Single Image Updates
Here’s an example of this. I selected an appealing picture from this post and uploaded the image to Facebook. I then added a brief description of the image and an invitation to read the blog post.
The post received more than average shares and likes and brought some decent visitors to the website.
Collages
I’ve never tried ‘collage’ image-based updates on Facebook before, so this was a brand new experience. I’m happy I tried it. I used the no-cost web software Pic Monkey to create these collages, consisting of photos taken from blog posts. Here are a few examples:
I was somewhat amazed by the college update. It was a collage of photos from this blog article. However, I was tempted not to publish it because it wasn’t an attractive collage. The blog post was rather technical and had diagrams, but there were no striking photos. But, it is evident that the update did pretty well, with lots of shares and likes and driving an abundance of traffic.
This collage was essentially an image with diagrams illustrating that the photo was illuminated. In some ways, the idea was a ‘how to in the image itself. People didn’t need to click on the link in the image’s description to put the information in position – however, the connection was connected!
Albums
I’ve employed this method previously with great success. Instead of uploading just one image or putting multiple photos from a blog post to create collages, I put various pictures in their albums.
Here’s an example of one of the albums below (I only uploaded it a couple of minutes ago, but it’s already receiving a lot of likes). These are six images taken from a more extensive collection of pictures on my website.
Interaction Updates
Another type of update I’ve always done since it draws many comments and interactions is when I pose a question followerspro.
When we ask followers what photos they’ve taken, we get not just plenty of comments, but many of the people who reply upload their photos that we can view. Simple actions like this get users looking at each other’s pictures and commenting/liking the comments of others (actual involvement).
Link Updates
Although I’ve attempted to utilize “image” updates this week more often than I did previously, I’m still sharing a couple of ‘link’- based updates too.
Facebook has recently altered how they display images so that the next time you post large pictures within the post that you’re linking to, Facebook shows a bigger, more expansive version of the image with the new update, which makes it more visually attractive.
