Facebook has been a major success since it was founded back in 2004. Along with its miraculous power of connectivity between people, Facebook has also helped several brands to smell success. Through Facebook, brands could easily reach their target audience, establish an informal liaison with them, raise awareness, and create hype. And all these could be achieved organically without using paid ads.
However, the scenario changed somewhat a little in 2014-2015 when businesses saw less organic results for their posts. They were left confused and frustrated as to how come such a traffic generator, and branding tool became a pay-to-play platform.
The problem in getting organic results and to show up in Facebook News Feed is the amount of engagement a post gets. Facebook is alerted when a particular post is liked and shared by many, thereby indicating the interest factor of that post. Only then Facebook decides to let that post show up in the news feed sections. However, the catch is, you have to get enough engagement to show up in a news feed, but you need to actually show up in their news feed to get that engagement.
Quite confusing, isn’t it?
Well, it is not when you know the trick to get new engagements. What exactly is Facebook engagement after all? It’s nothing but the number of likes, comments and shared a certain post receives. It is all about the action fans take. The kind of action your fans take up for your brand determines your ability to create engagement. Through your post engagement metrics, Facebook decides how many audiences see your posts. There are certain tricks to create engagement and even sustain it.
Well, the trick is no rocket science. Due to the great demand of new and unique contents, and the trend of contents getting stale within a few hours in social media, the constant supply of new contents should be unhampered. So in this situation, you may find yourself struggling to come up with brand new and unique contents every day.
Earlier we had discussed as to how you can promote your Blog post on Facebook and get maximum readership, today based on our own experience with our brand, we have brought to you ten tips to start getting more likes, comments, clicks and shared on your Facebook posts.
Try out these ten tactics and increase engagement with your Facebook marketing efforts, with no pokes required.
1. Find out the ‘Right’ time
Facebook gives you a lot of competition when it comes to posting unique contents. As more and more brands are joining Facebook, it has become all the more challenging to stand out and create a niche of your brand. Also, the number of posts published has become substantially high. That creates a lot of rivalries to stay up-to-date.
This could be easily solved by posting at the right time when the engagement is highest. Though most users check their Facebook feeds all through the day, the actual and continuous engagement happens only at night. When the students, the office goers, and the other professional individuals relax in their cozy couch at home.
According to Buzzsumo, posts that are published between 10 pm, and midnight, gets the most engagement.
Nonetheless, you can try experimenting different time schedules to determine which timing works best for your brand.
2. Include Social Media Graphics
As we all know human eyes crave for visual elements, the more you can have images supporting your posts, the more you grab eyeballs. It has been found that photos and images receive 53% more likes on Facebook than the average post and 84% more clicks.
Social media graphics are great tools to create engagement across all social media platforms, not only Facebook. A post when turned into a beautiful visual piece, it creates more traction than a plain textual post.
3. User-Generated Content (UGC)
What is social media made up of? Sharing and building relationships. So in the midst of this sharing and caring thing, how about receiving contents that are created by your audience and fans? Because when asked, 93% of customers have responded that they find UGC very helpful to guide their purchasing decisions. Even UGC gets 29% higher website conversions compared to websites that lack it.
To get more engagement, you must interact with your fans, run a survey, host a contest, start a comment thread on a hot topic, ask your customers to take selfies with your products and post, share contents that are relevant and useful to your audience.
You Facebook engagement is bound to escalate.
4. Give some inside story of your company
Sometimes you must toot your own horn, about your brand, provide some insights of your company, and promote your business, but without being too pushy or on the face. You must be subtle enough to let your promotions don’t seem promotional.
You may post photos of your employees, a birthday celebration, welcoming a new employee, farewells, annual meetings, the town where you are based, office outings and parties, etc. You may also give photos of your satisfied customers.
These are a few cool things that can bring you a fair share of engagement on Facebook.
5. Don’t miss Call To Action
Call to actions are psychological drivers to take action against a certain offer or something of that kind. But many marketers fail to recognize the power of the call to actions and ignore it. But you need to understand that if you want your fans and target audience to do something for you, you have to ask for it. If you don’t ask, they don’t do! Simple!
What do you want your fans to do for you? Like your post? Share it? Comment on it? Your audience will only respond better when they are given specifics as to what to respond to. Call to actions alone can get you the maximum amount of engagement on Facebook.
6. Show some Love
To get your community talking about you, creating a great deal of engagement, nothing can be better than showing your fans some unpretentious love. Love like how? Maybe in the form of sharing the posts and contents, your fans leave on your page. Or maybe appreciating their valuable thoughts about a certain post of yours publicly.
You show love; you get love. However, this love is more in the form of engagement that you desire!
7. Respond responsibly
A lot of effort and time you have given to come up with a unique content. But when you share it on Facebook and your fan actually like, share and comment on it, do you tend to ignore them? Never do this. People always expect to be heard, appreciated and responded. So don’t just make a post and move on.
If your fans/target audience takes time to leave a comment on that post, reply to them as quickly as possible. Because they have resonated with your post and could relate themselves to it. Respond to these comments. This will make them feel special and valued, and more willing to engage with your future posts as well.
8. Have variety in your posts
Most often, brands take it for granted that since they are into a specific nature of business, all of their posts and contents need to be related to that field.
Well, that is not true. You cannot expect your fans and target audience to be interested only in the field you are in. Definitely, they want variations in your posts. If you are a chocolate manufacturing company and all your posts are directly related to chocolate, after a certain time your fans will be bored to death. Also after a certain time, you yourself will find it hard to produce any more content on the topic of chocolate. You will simply run out of anymore topic.
So get some variety in your writings. if you want people to engage with your Facebook posts, share such contents they want to see, not what you want to make them see. But also ensure you do not deviate much. Strike a perfect balance.
9. Facebook Ads
Facebook ads are a great tool to help boost engagement if you do it correctly. You can choose an ad type, and then can choose photos, videos, texts or an Instagram post. You shall get a designing recommendation for these formats, so as to get an optimum result. These ads can boost up your Facebook engagement and grow your audience.
10. Get some ‘Fun’ factor!
Don’t always think ‘business’ and ‘marketing’ while you publish your posts, poke some fun at it. Though the main motto of posting relevant content is to gain engagement, occasionally you can share something funny and hillarious. This can also get you engagement over Facebook, as funny memes are quite much in trend now. You can ask some random questions, and trust me, you can engage more people at once. Because not many people will like it if you talk only about yourself on social media.
Wrapping up!
Give your fans contents that can’t help but share it among themselves. Thus will your engagement be built. You can also track and measure the engagement that’s created by your efforts. And according to the latest news feed algorithm update, Facebook will show those stories that people like personally.
So what are the Facebook engagement enhancement methods you are taking resort to? Do you have anything to add on? Please feel free to leave your valuable comment in the comment section below.
