Have you thought of creating a Facebook page? Or do you have one but feel uncertain about how to go about using it? Are you worried at the thought of

You have just launched your gallery’s Facebook page? Or maybe you already have one, without really tending to it… You are worried investing yourself on social media is time consuming? Or that it requires means that are outside your reach?

False! Our advice gives the time and means to meet your digital ambition!

First of all, it's important to define the goals that you have for your Facebook page, this enable you to have a clear idea of where you want to be and then plan out the necessary steps for achieving the desired outcome.

1. Set concrete and precise objectives: why did you create your Facebook page?
2. Create a strategy to help you fulfill them:  what should I be focussing on?

What could these objectives be? Here is a non-exhaustive list that might give you a few ideas of what you can aim to achieve with your Facebook page.

• Increase the visibility and notoriety of your gallery
• Increase the number of visitors on your gallery website
• Develop your relationship with collectors 

Depending on your objective, you will need to adapt your strategy. For example, if you're interested in developing your relationship with your collector base, it might be a good idea to share interesting articles, create informative content and keep your posts interactive by encouraging your followers to leave comments.

If you've listed your objectives and planned out your strategy, we can move on to the next step: what content to post. When creating content you have to think about whether it will have value for your followers. Try to provide your audience with content that is informative, entertaining, practical etc even a beautiful image of an artwork might spark your collectors' interest.

To keep you audience engaged and to make the the page more personal, you can use pronouns such as "I" or "we". For example "we are very excited to announce a new upcoming exhibition".

Your facebook page is there to help your gallery grow but you must be careful to tread the line between self-promotion and interesting content carefully. If you followers feel that you are bombarding them with information concerning only your gallery and which is not presented in a thoughtful way, they may unsubscribe.

Social media is not a stand in for a blog, being brief is important if you don't want your followers to pay attention to what you have to say. Try not to write more than a few lines per post. However, if you do feel like you want to share more complex thoughts and ideas, why not start a blog?

Managing your Facebook page doesn't need to take you hours, the key is using the drafting and scheduling functionalities.

Drafts

The moment the idea of a post comes to your mind, write it down to not forget it and save it in drafts: put together a stock of posts to anticipate. Therefore, you won’t have to worry about running out of inspiration!

Scheduling

Here is “THE SOLUTION” to save time: schedule your posts in advance! Paid scheduling apps like Buffer will help you, or free ones like Hootsuite. Their advantage? Using one site, you will be able to schedule all you future posts on several social media accounts!

Set some time aside each week to plan future posts: set the date and time of publication in advance. Thus, you'll have more time to manage your page, and answer potential comments and messages from your followers.

In this way, you will not break the rhythm of your posts: in fact, you should be updating your page regularly if you want it to be useful to you.

Explore the statistics section on Facebook to learn more about the best times to post.

Lastly, make sure that all your followers can see your posts :

• Go on your gallery’s Facebook page in a private navigation window and check that all the posted content appears as planned. If that is not the case, change the confidentiality parameters.
• Finally, check that the content of your page displays correctly on smartphone, by looking at your Facebook page from your mobile phone.

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