As a blogger, should I have a Facebook page?

We have a Facebook page linked to our website but we haven’t updated it in a year. Is it worth keeping?

If you have set up a Facebook page or are thinking about it, just to get visits to your blog and don’t intend to engage with users of Facebook then it’s not worth having a page. It’s that simple.

Setting up a Facebook page and linking it to your blog or Twitter account is easy to do but just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

People often connect their Twitter account to Facebook, tweet something interesting and then forget to log in to see the replies from Facebook users. Family and friends feel like they are having one-way conversations, it’s pointless. Facebook people like interaction; it’s why they log in regularly.

The same thing applies to Facebook fan pages, if you are going to create one then make sure you log in regularly to talk to the people who have liked your page. There’s nothing wrong with sharing links to your blog but you should also post information that isn’t on your blog because people don’t’ always want to follow links outside of their Facebook bubble.

Facebook is very much a visual social network so sharing videos and pictures is always best. Some of the best memes were spawned on Facebook so try coming up with unique and funny content. You can always relate it to the topics you write about on your blog.

People are often put off by Facebook pages that don’t have many ‘likes’ no one seems to want to be the first. Get your friends and family to ‘like’ your page and then promote your page. If you have a strong readership on your blog, then the first place to start is obviously with a Facebook ‘like’ widget.

Write something unique on your Facebook page then tweet the link, this will let people know you have a fan page and hopefully, they will take the time to ‘like’ it. To keep them coming back you should update your page once or twice a week at the very least.

If all of this seems like too much work, then it really isn’t worth having a Facebook page. There’s nothing worse than a neglected page it serves as an advert to people who may think your blog is just as neglected. Delete the page and move on.