The Only 3 Words You Need to Know to Succeed on Facebook
Facebook is still where it’s at.
Regardless of what some hip trendsetters might see in the offing, Facebook isn’t going anywhere right now. It’s still everyone’s all-access pass to the biggest audience in the world.
Millions of people are waiting for you… All you need to do is talk to them.
OK, it’s not that easy. But almost.
As complicated and intricate as the inner workings of the Facebook ecosystem are, what it takes to succeed remains simple. As tedious as Facebook makes it to reach more than a tiny sliver of your hard-won audience, those users are still there and waiting for you. You just have to be clever to get a chance to actually talk to them.
Facebook forces us to adapt our day-to-day tactics, but the underlying strategies to reach our audiences are as immutable as ever.
Our CEO Josh recently summed these ideas up for AdWeek. Here’s the summary:
If you want to win on Facebook…
- Follow fast instead of being an early adopter.
- Test everything.
- For the love of God, don’t be boring.
Let me summarize this list even further and reduce each item to just one word. If you want to succeed on Facebook (or anywhere in the attention economy), you need to…
Imitate, analyze, and entertain.
(OK, so I realize that my list of words here kind of goes against the third piece of advice, but at this point, I must soldier on.)
Imitate early adopters after they’ve spent their own time and their investors’ money to figure things out.
Analyze the data you gather from your daily testing. (You are testing everything all the time, right?)
And do both of these in order to entertain your audience more today than you did yesterday. (By the way, it doesn’t matter what your industry is, if your goal is to win attention on Facebook, you work in entertainment.)
Imitate, analyze, entertain. That’s it.
If you obsess over those 3 one-word edicts as you communicate with your audience, you will reach them, and — best of all — they’ll like you for it.
But let’s get cynical for a second:
The fact that it’s so simple is almost more annoying than it is helpful. Because, yeah, you can break down what it takes to succeed into just a few mantras, and you can repeat them ad nauseam among your team or in unhelpfully simplistic blog posts (Sorry!)…but then after that you have to actually go do the work. And that’s the hard part.
Unfortunately, there’s no article or list of three words that will save you from that…
