Five signs your organisation's Facebook page is working against you

A Facebook page is not neutral. It is either earning you enquiries or quietly talking people out of dealing with you. There is no third option, because everyone who is considering your organisation will look at it, and they will draw a conclusion from whatever they find.

Here are the five things that most often turn a page into a liability, and what each one actually signals to the person looking.

1. The last post is months old

This is the most damaging and the easiest to fix. A visitor who sees nothing since March does not think "they are busy with work". They think "this may have closed", and closed businesses do not get phone calls.

Worse, it undermines everything else on the page. Your services, your photographs and your reviews all get discounted, because the visitor has already decided the page is abandoned.

The fix is not brilliance, it is rhythm. One useful post a week beats five in a burst followed by silence. A photograph of work you completed, with two honest sentences about it, is enough.

2. There is no obvious way to make contact

Count the taps between landing on your page and reaching a human. If it is more than one, you are losing people.

Many pages bury the phone number in the About section, or show none at all, or list an email nobody checks. Meanwhile the visitor is holding a phone and wants to ask one question.

Put a WhatsApp or call button on the page, make sure the number is monitored, and state your hours so people know when to expect an answer. This single change often produces more enquiries than a month of posting.

3. The branding is inconsistent

A stretched logo, a profile picture that is a cropped photograph, one colour on the page and a different one on the quotation you send out. Individually these are small. Together they tell a visitor that the organisation is informal.

That matters most at the exact moment you are being compared to someone else, or being considered for a tender. People read visual consistency as operational competence, fairly or not.

4. Every post is about you

Look at your last ten posts. Count how many are announcements about the organisation, and how many are useful to the reader on their own.

Most pages are almost entirely the first kind: we attended, we are pleased to announce, we celebrate. That content asks for attention without giving anything in return, so people scroll past it, and the page's reach falls accordingly.

The posts that work answer a question your customer actually has. What does this service cost and what affects the price. How do I know when I need this. What goes wrong when it is done badly. You already know these answers. Writing them down is the whole job.

5. Messages and comments go unanswered

An unanswered message is a lost customer who has already told you they were interested. An unanswered comment is worse, because it is public. The next person sees the question hanging there and concludes that you do not respond.

The same is true of a negative comment. Answering it calmly, in public, does more for your credibility than ten positive posts, because it shows people what happens when something goes wrong.

Set one time a day to clear messages and comments. It rarely takes more than ten minutes, and it is the highest return ten minutes on the page.

The honest test

Open your page on someone else's phone, as a stranger would, and answer three questions. Are these people open. Do they do what I need. How do I reach them. If any answer is unclear, that is not a small problem. That is your marketing.

Fix the five items above and the page starts doing its job. None of them requires a budget. All of them require somebody to own it.

If nobody has time to own it, that is what a presence retainer is for. See how we handle it or send us your page and we will tell you which of the five is costing you the most.