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New Update: Boost Social Proof with Reviews & Automation
Stacey Corrin
Stacey Corrin
John Turner
John Turner
Do you want to learn how to increase engagement on Facebook for your small business?
The constant changes to Facebook’s algorithm can make it hard for your posts to appear in the Facebook news feed. If the right audience doesn’t see your content, how can they interact with it and boost engagement?
In this article, we’ll show you how to increase engagement on Facebook so you can broaden your Facebook audience, improve your organic reach, and grow your business.
But first, let’s look at what engagement on Facebook is.
Facebook engagement is defined as measurable actions people take on your Facebook posts and pages. They can be simple actions such as liking, clicking, or sharing your post content or more involved ones like leaving a comment or asking a question.
When Facebook users engage with your posts, it sends a signal to Facebook’s algorithm, which prompts your content to appear higher up in the news feed. Higher engagement on your Facebook posts directly links to the potential for more people to see them.
So, what engagement rate should you aim for?
A good engagement rate on Facebook is anything above 1%. If your metrics are regularly lower than this, it’s a sign that your followers aren’t engaged with your content and are likely inactive.
A low Facebook engagement rate can indicate you’re sharing too many or too few posts. Posting anything less than 2 times per week will result in a loss of engagement.
So how do you get more engagement on Facebook? The following quick tips will get you more comments and shares in no time.
Let’s dive in.
If you want to know how to increase engagement on Facebook, you should first get to know your followers. You need to understand what type of content your target audience relates to and what gets them excited enough to interact with your updates.
An excellent place to start is your Facebook Page Insights data. Here you’ll find heaps of information about your audience, such as which formats they like the most if they prefer video posts over text posts, and more.
Once you’ve studied this information, you can decide what to post to increase engagement.
People don’t like being sold to. If you’re sharing content on any social media platform that reads like a sales pitch, you won’t see positive results.
The truth is that people use social media to escape and distract themselves. They want to consume content that entertains, informs, and delights them, not endless Facebook ads.
With the information gathered from your insights, think carefully about your audience and what you think they’d like to know. What would make them smile or laugh out loud enough to share with a friend?
Build-A-Bear Workshop does a great job with this social media marketing campaign. They clearly understand that their audience enjoys a bit of light-hearted fun, and by using a trending meme, they’ve managed to put their own spin on it while promoting their brand.
Just look at the engagement on that!
As you already know, social media moves quickly, so the last thing people want to see when they flick through their Facebook feed are graphics, text, and videos that look shabby and thrown together.
Put your effort into making any content you create high quality. You don’t need to go all out and pay a fortune for a graphic designer. You can create quality content by keeping your posts simple, consistent, and recognizable.
That leads us nicely to your images.
Facebook is an image-heavy platform, and posts that include high-quality images tend to receive higher-than-average engagement rates. Including great images in your Facebook marketing strategy is a quick way to increase your engagement rates easily.
Images don’t need to be complicated, either. A clear product shot or closeup using your smartphone is often enough to capture a great photo.
If you’re not so confident about your photography skills, you can use free public-domain images to tell a story.
Video is fast becoming the most used media type consumed by users on social media. Facebook reports they get 8 billion video views daily. That’s way more than newer social networks like TikTok.
Adding regular videos to your Facebook strategy is a great way to engage with your audience. Facebook live video, for example, can get you 6 times more interaction than a regular video.
Remember that if you host live videos, shoot them in portrait mode. Vertical Facebook videos take up the most space on mobile devices, making them far more visible.
Sometimes it’s the simple things like asking questions that can get people’s attention. A well-phrased question can launch a bustling comments section that’ll see your Facebook post engagement soar.
Here are a few ways you can kick off a good question post:
In this example, the Facebook Page for a popular PC game used their update to ask fans what they’d like to ask developers in an upcoming real-time Q & A session.
This 2-pronged approach generated a good deal of engagement and gave the page owners valuable Facebook insights.
According to Facebook, our attention spans are now shorter than that of a goldfish. Combine this with the fact it takes only 1.7 seconds for us to consume a piece of content on mobile, and things may look a little bleak.
However, it’s entirely possible to keep up with this continual scrolling. Keep your posts short, sweet, and easy to consume.
That way, you can quickly capture people’s attention and entice them to stop scrolling long enough to engage with your post.
No rule says everything you post on Facebook must be 100% original. The majority of posts on Facebook are updates shared from other sources. You can use this to your advantage when you’re stuck on ideas.
Collect excellent quality content from around the web that you know your audience will love. Then share it on your page when you know they’ll be active (more on that later) to get the most engagement. Even a well-timed case study can generate a ton of engagement!
It might seem simplistic, but the act of actually replying to comments and questions from your fans can go a long way to improve engagement.
Getting a response to their Facebook comment makes people feel like they’re listened to and that their opinions matter. Doing so makes them more likely to engage with you in the future.
Make sure you or a team member dedicates time to reply to comments. If you use Facebook Messenger to interact with fans, aim to get the ‘very responsive’ badge which shows potential customers you’re quick to respond.
UGC is content created by fans that you can use to drive engagement on your Facebook posts. You can use UGC to make your fans feel more involved with your brand, which is a great way to increase brand loyalty.
Here are some ways you can use UGC to increase engagement on Facebook:
In this example, a popular game leverages UGC as a regular feature to share their favorite fan art. Just take a look at those reactions!
Besides having a backlog of exciting content to share with your Facebook fans, it’s important to know when the right time to post is.
Remember those page insights we discussed earlier? Jump back into them and use the data to learn when your audience will most likely be active and engaged.
According to this article, the best time to post on Facebook is between 9 am and 2 pm EST on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday for B2B brands.
For B2C businesses, you’ll find that 12 pm EST on Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday is the ideal time.
Following on from publishing posts at the right time to increase your engagement, it’s also vital you have a consistent publishing schedule.
If you’re posting randomly once a week, it’s easy for people to think that you don’t have enough content to share with them, so what’s the point of following you?
On the other hand, if you publish to Facebook once a day and keep to that schedule, people will come to expect that from you and judge it as worth their time to follow and engage with you.
There are many social media management and marketing tools for scheduling content ahead of time, including Buffer, Hootsuite, and more.
Remember that Facebook update you shared a year ago that got heaps of engagement for your page? Well, there’s no reason why you can’t share it again.
It makes sense to capitalize on content that’s performed well for you in the past, but don’t make the mistake of re-publishing the same content.
Say you shared a link to an article with a caption listing the main points, which got heaps of attention in the past.
You can recycle that by sharing the link with an explainer video instead. That’s precisely what Buffer did, and it got them more Facebook engagement.
Another way to get more mileage out of those Facebook posts that perform the best is to use some of your Facebook advertising budget to boost posts and reach a wider audience.
Look at it this way. Your best-performing content is content that’s proven to engage your audience on Facebook. With the correct targeting, they can keep increasing engagement and reach more people.
Check out these Facebook marketing tips for even more ideas.
Like Instagram Stories, Facebook Stories sit at the top of the News Feed, which is a great way to draw people’s eyes upwards.
Stories are a more informal way to share updates with your fans because they’re only available for a short time. You can post as frequently as you like without interrupting your followers’ feeds.
Due to that authentic connection, fans are more likely to engage with your posts now and in the future. You can also cross-promote stories to Instagram stories and include trending hashtags to attract new fans and influencers.
Contests and giveaways usually generate a ton of engagement on Facebook. When you use RafflePress, the best contests plugin for WordPress, you can seamlessly link your Facebook giveaway to your blog or website.
The Grow Your Facebook Page giveaway template included with RafflePress is the perfect way to grow your Facebook followers and increase engagement successfully.
The built-in entry actions are designed to help your contests go viral, ultimately leading to more growth for your page.
Some of the methods to enter include following you on LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, and more.
Moreover, RafflePress is lightweight and SEO-friendly. That means it won’t slow down your site and can help your giveaway page rank in search engines.
You can check out our step-by-step guide to run a giveaway on Facebook here, or you can click here for more Facebook giveaway ideas.
When trying to increase engagement on Facebook, marketers often overlook instructions for what they want users to do next. What do you want your fans to do? Where do you want them to go after reading your status update?
More commonly called a call to action (CTA), it’s a statement added to the end of your post, essentially telling people what to do. If you’re sharing a blog post, your CTA could be to ask them to leave a comment with their thoughts.
You can also add a CTA button to your page that gives people more engagement options besides simply liking, sharing, and commenting. With the Facebook CTA button, you can ask visitors to:
Now they know exactly the kind of action you’d like them to take next.
This leads us nicely to using Facebook groups for increasing engagement.
Creating a Facebook Group linked to your business Page is a genuine way to increase discussions around your brand. While people engage with you in your group, your brand will be at the top of their minds making you instantly more recognizable across Facebook as a whole.
Because your Facebook group is linked to your page, the group engagement could influence how posts from your Facebook page rank in the news feed.
Take a look at this example from WPBeginner. Their WordPress vision check update posted to their Facebook Group generated over 600 comments.
Related: How WPForms Got 11K+ Facebook Group Members with RafflePress
By displaying a Facebook feed on your website, you can make it known that you’re on the platform. Plus, visitors can interact with your Facebook content directly from your site.
To embed a Facebook feed on your WordPress site, we recommend using Smash Balloon.
Smash Balloon’s Custom Facebook Feed Pro is super simple to set up. All you have to do is install the plugin, connect it to your Facebook account, and in less than 30 seconds, you can display a beautiful Facebook feed anywhere on your site.
With Smash Balloon, you can also display likes, comments, shares, and reactions to show social proof, and the built-in share options make it easy for users to share your Facebook posts on other social media sites.
Finally, our last quick tip to increase engagement on Facebook is to avoid what Facebook calls engagement baiting.
Engagement baiting is the practice of asking for likes and shares in return for engagement. If you’re caught engaging in this practice, Facebook will penalize you by downranking your Facebook posts in the algorithm.
As we mentioned earlier, it’s perfectly okay to ask genuine questions. Yet, when you start asking for comments that don’t require genuine thought, you cross over into engagement bait territory.
That’s it!
In this article, we’ve shown you how to increase engagement on Facebook. Now all that’s left is putting it into practice and increasing your engagement rates.
While you’re here, you might be interested in learning why you should NOT buy Facebook likes, go check it out. Or, if you’d rather learn how to increase engagement on Twitter, read this.
Don’t forget to follow our YouTube channel for video tutorials. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter here.
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