You may have noticed that as the fan base of your page increases, it becomes more and more challenging to engage your audience.
Moreover, with Facebook limiting the organic reach of your posts in the last couple months, it has become even more difficult to maintain consistent Facebook engagement rates.
Posting quality content is the key to obtaining for success on Facebook. It’s not all about selling. It’s about posting content that is engaging, conversational, arouses curiosity or is inspirational.
Don’t forget an average user likes over 100 pages, so the battle boils down to how you can keep them intrigued in your content for them to interact with it.
But what do you mean by engagement?
Engagement is a measure of how your fans interact with your posts.
Types on engagement includes:
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
- Clicks on links
Not all interactions are equal. Likes are generally easier to get than shares and it is believed that Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm takes this into account and weights each interaction differently. Shares and comments are highly valued.
You need to experiment with different content types to find out what resonates with your audiences.
You can use Facebook Insights to filter out what posts are more engaging. Look for spikes. Do more of what works, and less of what doesn’t.
Using insights will also help you further filter your content strategy.
8 ways to use Facebook Insights to enhance Facebook engagement
1. Post type: See which type of data is getting you the most response. Is it video/links/ photos or plain text? This may vary depending on the category of your page and the audience you are targeting. At the moment, we are seeing
2. Kind of post: Do your fans enjoy informative content? Do they react when asked a question? Or respond to good humor? Are they looking for tips from you?
3. Length of post: Also look out for the length of your posts. Do shorter posts get higher engagement than longer posts or there is no difference?
4. Time of post: During which hours do your posts get the maximum reach and interactions? Is it when you post early morning or late evening? Keep an eye for odd hours as well as sometimes your posts tend to get highest reach outside business hours.
5. Day of Post: Identify the day of highest engagement in the week. Post higher no. of posts that day as compared to days with lower levels of engagement.
6. When fans are online: Using Facebook insights page level data, you can find out during which hours your maximum fans are online each day. Ensure you post your updates during these peak hours.
7. Unlikes: Look for cues like a possible pattern in the unlikes you are receiving. Are you losing fans if your post frequency is too high some days (over 2-3 posts)? Are you also losing fans by posting at a specific time or by updating any specific type of content?
8. Age Group: Identify the most reached vs. most engaging age group on your page. This will help you tweak your tone of voice and type of updates accordingly.
9 Content tips to improve your Facebook engagement
1. Ask Questions: Questions will tend to elicit answers as you are directly asking your fans for a response. Questions could be of various types including opinions, true or false, did you know etc.
2. Use call to actions: Include a call to action in your post. Ask for a like or a share. For instance, you may say ‘Like’ if you agree or ‘Comment’ and tell us why you don’t. Alternatively, try using Facebook’s new call to action buttons in your post and see if they improve click throughs for you. If you don’t ask you don’t get. This simple tactic can work well but don’t overuse it.
3. Run contests: Fans are always eager to receive some form of incentive for their participation. You can choose to run simple wall based contests or more robust app based contests for your fans depending on your budget and objectives. Reward your fans by giving them an incentive, which could be as simple as updating your photo cover with their picture or dedicating a page post thanking them.
4. Fill in the blank: Ask users to fill in the blanks on your update. This works very well for generating comments, as users often like to boast their knowledge.
5. Quotes: Use quotes to attract attention. Users visit Facebook for interesting content, if they like your quote then they won’t shy from liking or sharing it with their circle of friends.
6. Photo Captions: Upload a photo and ask users to caption it for you. This could be an artistic product shot or a picture connected to your brand. You can also choose to reward the best caption.
7. Identify the person/object/place/artist: For example, if you represent an airline company, you could upload pictures or videos of a destination you fly to and ask users to guess its name.
8. Spot the difference: Upload two similar images with 5-7 differences in them. Ask your users to spot the differences in both the images. You could use your brand’s products in the image and it also works in subtly increasing your brand recall.
9. Arouse curiosity: If you have ever followed Mamamia on Facebook you will know what I mean. Below is post that uses curiosity to attract likes, shares and comments. It attracted 167 likes, 67 shares and 53 comments.
What if your engagement is still low?
If you find that engagement is low despite following these tips, you might need to look at the reach of your page posts.
The fact is, if Facebook thinks no one is interacting with your page, then it won’t push your content into your fans news feed.
As a result, it will be challenging to get engagement if a large percentage of your fans don’t see your content.
Therefore, you will need to employ a different strategy and use Facebook ads to boost your reach to get some engagement – but make sure you promote your best content by looking at your Facebook insights first.
As engagement improves, you will find that your posts will get more reach organically.
Do you have any other tested ideas or tips that have helped amplify Facebook engagement for your page?