A Guide to Facebook Engagement

There are two ways businesses need to use Facebook. The first involves a financial investment, and this really is crucial if you want your messages to reach a wider audience, resulting in leads and sales. The second way is to focus on your organic reach, working to increase engagement.  Engagement is essential if you’re spending time marketing on Facebook.  If your fans don’t interact with your posts, the organic reach declines, leaving you with a smaller audience. To increase your reach you have to increase engagement, but how do you go about this?

Get Your Head Around the Whole “Facebook Engagement” Thing

When you manage to get your audience to engage with the content you’re sharing on Facebook, you’re reach will increase. Facebook notices the interaction that’s taking place and rewards you by sharing your posts in the news feeds of your fans and their friends too. Sadly, when your posts achieve little to no engagement, the opposite happens, and your content will rarely be shown in anyone’s news feed.

How is Engagement Judged?

The Facebook powers that be only care about content that gets likes, comments, shares or clicked on.  If you’re unable to achieve likes, comments, shares or clicks, Facebook assumes that no one will care about your content and so they won’t distribute it to your fans.  No engagement, no reach. However, with no reach, how can you increase engagement?

Push the Promotional Posts

In order for your fans to see your content, you will need to promote your boosts by using their advertising. However, small budgets mean that not all content can be promoted on Facebook, but that doesn’t mean you should just stop sharing on Facebook. It simply means that you have to tweak the content so that it encourages likes, comments, shares and clicks. The reach of both promotional and non-promotional content will be increased, helping to improve engagement.

Posts that Ask for Interaction

Begin by creating content that pushes fans to interact with your content, by liking, sharing, commenting or clicking on the post you put out there.  Asking questions is a good place to start, but try to ignite an emotion within the question to help you to achieve likes, as likes are often a lot easier to achieve than any other type of engagement.  You want your fans to like or reply and they have to care enough about the post to take the time to respond. Igniting an emotion is a good way of pushing for this engagement.

Add Images to Your Status

Images remain popular on Facebook. Keep the content friendly and casual and ensure the image is good quality and shareable. Brand your own original content and don’t be afraid to ask your fans to like your status too, it does no harm and doesn’t have an effect on Facebook algorithms. Images also help to increase the number of clicks on a link that you share, just make sure it grabs the attention of your fans.

Ask for Opinions

Encourage engagement by letting your fans know that you want their opinions and the opportunity to find out what they want from you.  Facebook fans love to have their say so you can take advantage of this and use the opportunity to learn more about them. You can also ask for readers of your blog and your subscribers to leave their opinions and thoughts over on your Facebook page by asking a question and leaving a link.

Shareable Content

Think about what makes a post shareable.  Love them or hate them, inspirational quotes do incredibly well on Facebook and there’s no reason why you can’t take advantage of this.  Spend time finding the best quotes (not all quotes have the same effect) and create an original image with that quote, share it on your page and watch it fly.

Start paying close attention to the engagement that you’re getting from your statuses on Facebook and begin making changes to increase your reach. We’re on hand if you need help with your social media marketing, get in touch to discuss your goals.

Have you seen a decline in Facebook engagement on your page? Visit us on Facebook to tell us what action you’ve been taking to try and reverse the decline.