Learn How People Read Facebook and Make Your Business Page Better

December 22nd, 2011 by Search Influence Alumni

With the era of social media marketing only growing by the day, more and more business owners are realizing that maintaining a presence on websites such as Facebook or Google+ is not just an option anymore — it’s essential. Establishing a business page on these sites is the first step, but once you do, do you know how to make it interesting enough to keep readers returning for more?

A recent study posted on Mashable reveals some interesting information about how people view Facebook pages and what parts of them have the most influence. As you can see by the heat map pictured above on Starbucks’ Facebook page, people tend to look at a business’ wall first — and often for four times longer than any other part of the page.

The study also proved that images get attention too, as the page that had the most photos (PlayStation) made people stick around longer. It also taught us that having a person in your profile photos rather than just a photo of an item (a person drinking a Coke rather than just the can, for instance) elicited more of a response.

Another bit of common sense that popped up in the study was that content up top on your profile performs best — which falls perfectly in line with the studies about people’s general net attention span.

It is because of this element that the idea of keeping a page moving with consistent content is a good one. If people see the same thing at the top of your page every time they visit, they are likely to visit less, but seeing something new means the chance of them visiting more often to check out what’s new.

So now we know how to make our Facebook business pages that much better, but what about Google+ pages? Huffington Post recently offered some great tips on how to make the most of yours, including how to best set up your About page, create galleries, use Hangouts and more.

Do you have any tricks and tips that you feel are especially effective for you on your own business page? Or, when you visit another business’ page, what jumps out at you first or keeps you around?