“Click like if you remember this.”  That simple line (or “Click like if you love _____.”), plus a photo, can score your Facebook page countless shares and likes. And the vitality of your business’s presence on Facebook depends on garnering this kind of interaction.

You are probably already familiar with SEO, or search engine optimization, which determines how often your web page comes up in Google searches.  You need to also try to maximize the number of views achieved by each of your postings on Facebook — because even if you have 1,000 fans, as few as 300 of them may see something you post come through on their news feed. Facebook conveniently provides this number in the bottom left corner of the posting so you can keep score.

EdgeRank is an algorithm that is the reason fans don’t see every post from pages they like.  According to the  web site Inside Facebook, “Facebook assigns a value to every possible story that could end up in the feed. This value is based on affinity, weight and time. Affinity is the relationship between the user and the page or friend that created an item. Weight is affected by the type of story, for instance, whether it is a photo upload or a comment on another person’s status. Facebook tends to value rich media content. The third factor affecting EdgeRank is how recently an action was taken.”

There are two factors that stand out in this quote: providing media-rich postings, and getting your customers to interact with it.  Posting without a photo or image immediately makes your entry less appealing. If you can’t take a photo, look for one from the web site of one of your vendors.  We pay a yearly subscription fee to a stock photo and clip art company (iclipart.com) and make use of their images on Facebook. Video postings are even more likely to be shown in a feed, and to be viewed.

Getting your customers to interact with your posting takes creativity, although the simple “like if you love” or “like if you remember” idea mentioned earlier is certainly easy to do. Since it’s a bit cooler today, I’m going to post “like if you can’t wait for Frasier Fir” to arrive. I’ll also add a question about which Frasier Fir customers like best.

Last week we did a little contest using the photo above that I took at Madison’s Henry Vilas Zoo. We asked customers to write a caption for the photo, and I’m happy to say that we had about witty 50 entries (I posted it twice).  A few people even tried to incorporate something about our store into their caption, although the photo really didn’t have anything to do with Orange Tree Imports aside from the fact that the Zoo is in our neighborhood.  We printed out the entries and invited our staff to select the winner, which was: “Does this boulder make my but look big?” The enjoyment it gave the customers entering the contest, and those who read their captions, was well worth the $25 gift card we offered as a prize — and as an added bonus, I’m sure we improved our Facebook views.

Happy Retailing,

Carol “Orange” Schroeder