How to Boost Your Facebook Engagement

Facebook has long been an effective marketing tool for online businesses, SaaS platforms, and personal brands.

If you are marketing online, you're very likely to have a Facebook page that you update on a semi-regular basis. However, posting updates is not enough. Without putting in the effort, you are likely to see little to no noticeable impact.

This has become worse with Facebook, limiting brands’ organic visibility over the years.

These days it's next to impossible to drive engaged users to your Facebook page without investing in ads. But even if you do use Facebook Advertising Platform, your chances to hear back from your Facebook followers are slim, unless you invest time into creating a Facebook engagement strategy.

You may see your Facebook page performance staggering. The truth is, you are probably not properly engaging your viewers. Few pages do, relying on regular status updates when there is so much more to it than that.

If you want to get more out of your Facebook page, check out these tips on increasing your engagement on Facebook:

1. Use fun contests

Some of the most successful ways of generating communication between your brand and followers are to create fun contests for them to enter.

For example, George Takei has taken this to a new level on his Facebook page by doing regular fan caption contests. These posts get thousands of submissions by eager followers hoping to get a laugh from the actor.

Make your followers and customers want to engage with you by giving them a chance to win something, even if it's just a status update announcing that they reign supreme. But having a prize is a great way of further pushing them to enter. You can also add your Facebook giveaway to your blog to engage your site readers with your Facebook marketing.

2. Provide fan-only incentives

Make your Facebook followers feel special by offering them an exclusive fan-only deal or even a freebie.

Some companies provide sales codes and discounts or free stuff to followers only. This is a simple way to get your demographic to connect. If your offer is well-timed, you may see even better results. For example, BLANQI posted a free “exclusive” gift guide right in time for pre-Christmas shopping:

Notice their smart tagging strategy, which drives organic engagement.

3. Post viral content

Social media status updates are crucial to keeping people interested and engaged with your page. But you should also be posting amusing, entertaining and relevant content for them to enjoy and share.

It is also a good idea to use Google Trends both for your SEO- and social-media-driven content to catch seasonal interest and trigger more engagement.

Viral videos and pictures are especially great, as well as interesting links. If they share it with others, the source of the original update (which would be you) is shared along with it, and anyone who clicks is taken to your post.

Buzzsumo is a great tool to generate some ideas for engaging Facebook content “to steal.” Inside their content section, there’s a nice Facebook tab allowing you to search by a keyword and filter results by content type (e.g. images and videos):

To share your engaging Facebook content with your blog readers, you may want to use one of these plugins. This way, your readers will help generate some free engagement for your Facebook content to boost its visibility. It is also a great idea to start streaming live videos from your Facebook page as these are highly engaging.

4. Ask questions

When you do give status updates, they should provide a quick request for a user response. So instead of simply talking about what is going on, also ask a question to get the ball rolling.

Users love sharing their own experiences. For example, if you have a sale on sweaters at your e-commerce store, ask along with the announcement when they can remember being the coldest in their life, and so could have really used the sweater.

You will be surprised by the amount of responses you get, and because it comes up in the feed on the main page to their friends, you will draw others over to answer the same question.

5. Give plenty of calls to action

Anything that has 'Click Here' is one of the best tools you have on your fanpage. A call to action asks for the user to do something specific, such as enter to win a prize, share you around or like your page. Use plenty of them throughout the page itself, not only in status updates but also in side tabs.

Facebook offers to customize your main page CTA, so make sure to experiment with those options, depending on your current marketing strategy.

6. Set up your Facebook Messenger

Facebook offers some basic but useful options to set up your page messenger for it to send automated messages to welcome your customers and send them down your sales funnel. As such, you can set up personalized messages to:

• Let your followers know when you are away
• Follow up with your customers after an appointment
• Share your location and contact information
• Give answers to set questions

Additionally, you can set up a custom message to greet people before they send your Page a message. Your greeting appears in the chat window before a message is sent or in the About section of your business's Messenger profile.

Monitoring Facebook Engagement

Finally, you cannot improve what you are not monitoring, so keep an eye on your stats and numbers on a regular basis.

1. Agorapulse

Agorapulse is a nice multi-purpose social media management platform that allows you to both maintain and monitor your Facebook page. It will help you keep track of your audience and engagement growth as well as evaluate your team’s performance by showing you how actively they reply to your page followers.

2. Finteza

Finteza is an on-site web analytics suite with a strong emphasis on event tracking and analytics. You can easily add links to the list of tracked events using their Wordpress plugin. From there, you can slice and dice your reports to monitor different types of your audience engaging with identified events, once they click through your Facebook CTA. For example:

• See people using different devices or screen resolutions go through your sales funnel
• Watch particular referral traffic engage with your events
• Monitor users from specific locations click your identified links and follow down your conversion funnel:

Finteza allows you to assess how your Facebook referral traffic is engaging with your sales funnel.

Conclusion

Are you doing all you can to engage your fans? Use these tips, and you will be!