10 ways to increase your engagement on Facebook

These days, it’s pretty common place for a business to have a Facebook account. In fact, 60 million businesses have Facebook pages. After all, it’s a free and easy way to promote a business and build a following. However, many businesses will get disheartened when there isn’t a high engagement rate. This will often lead to less usage of Facebook, which can be damaging for a brand.

So how do you get more engagement on Facebook?

There are a few tactics you can implement to ensure your engagement increases:

1. Content

Think about the type of content you are writing. Content always needs to be relevant to your business, or else your audience won’t be interested. Not only does it have to be relevant, but it has to offer something. Don’t just produce content that promotes your business. Your audience will read your content if they get something out of it.

Remember to also consider your Facebook posts. What is the brand voice of your Facebook account? Is it aligned with your website? Is your business corporate, serious, professional, or more fun and laid back? Deciding this will ultimately help you construct better Facebook posts that will relate to your audience.

2. Ask Questions

If you’re wanting to increase engagement, one of the easiest ways to do so is to ask questions. People will be more likely to answer a question, rather than leave an opinion on a post that is just a statement. It’s good to keep questions relevant to your business, but also think about things such as holidays or events that are coming up.

3. Visuals

When publishing a post to Facebook, it’s a good idea to include a photo. Visuals will make your post stand out and you’ll be more likely to catch the attention of your audience. Photos even account for 93% of the most engaging posts on Facebook. Posts with photos receive higher numbers of likes, comments and even better click-through rates.   

You can even consider making an infographic. These are liked and shared on social media three times more than any other type of content. This is because they are not only visual and attractive, but include a lot of useful information. Infographics make for a great resource, and as such will receive more shares and engagement on social media.  

4. Facebook Ads

Last year saw a dramatic decrease in organic reach for Facebook Pages, dropping 52 percent.

As a result of the amount of posts appearing in News Feeds, Facebook became more selective about which posts would appear. Facebook wants the user to keep coming back to the website, and as such chooses the post it deems most interesting to the individual user.

To ensure businesses can still make the most out of the social media platform, it’s a good idea to consider Facebook Ads. There are many different formats of ads which you can select from, depending on your objective. For engagement, the best options are Page Like, Page Post Photo or Page Post Video ads. It’s important to correctly target your Facebook ads in order to ensure maximum exposure. If incorrectly targeted, you could miss out on promoting your business to an important segment of your market.

5. Frequency of posting

How often you post can effect your Facebook engagement. After all, you don’t want to post too often and appear spammy. But you also want to post frequently enough to get high engagement and be noticed.

Buddy Media found businesses that post one or two times a day receive 40% higher engagement when compared to pages that post more than three times a day. Rather than focus on the quantity of posts on your Facebook page, it’s better to focus on the quality.

6. Timing

To get high engagement, you not only need to post frequently, but also need to be posting at the right time of day. After all, you want the maximum amount of your audience to see your post.  

However, as a result of Facebook’s complex algorithm, it’s difficult to know when the perfect time to post is. If you’re wanting to get more likes, comments, shares and click-throughs, Hootsuite found the best time to post on Facebook is between 12pm and 3pm Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. If you’re publishing on the weekend, this should be between 12pm and 1pm. Posts on the weekend will receive less engagement than those during the week.  

Peak engagement times can also vary depending on your business, and whether it’s local or international. If most of your customers are from overseas, you may have to adjust the timing of your posts.

7. Engage with your audience

It’s always frustrating when a customer wants to ask a question from a business, posts on Facebook, and then receives no answer. Often pages have numerous comments left unanswered. Businesses sometimes reply to every question with the same standard response, which also leaves consumers frustrated.

To avoid this, it is better to make sure you engage with your audience. Make sure you personalise responses - the user will feel far more appreciated than when they receive a standard response. If you’ve got a creative writing or social media team, you can even just reply to statements, rather than only answering questions. Boost Juice is a great example of a company who has personalised messages, and often leaves witty remarks or memes in response to comments.  

Facebook also now displays how quickly a business responds to a customer's message. It could potentially do your business harm if you have a very slow response rate. People will be less likely to post if they know their query is going to remain unanswered. If necessary, get commenters to message you, rather than trying to resolve their problem through lots of comments on your Facebook page. 

8. Like Vs Share

Getting people to vote on something is a great way to increase engagement. Post two photographs and get people to “like” for option one, or “share” for option two. This will not only increase engagement, but cause the post to be shown in more people’s News Feeds, and therefore increase the amount of people liking the post.

Facebook also introduced new buttons last year, which gives users six different response emotions. You can ask users to respond with one of the emotions, which means you can post more than two photographs.

9. Add social media buttons

To direct more traffic to your Facebook page, add social media buttons on your website. The next decision is where you’re going to place the button on your website. It’s often a good idea to have them displayed in more than one place. Have them at the top and bottom of your landing page and blog posts. Only placing social media buttons at the bottom of a post runs the risk of people not wanting to scroll through a long article to share content. You can also include social media buttons on the left or right of content, so people can share as they are reading. As pictured, Matter includes social media buttons on the left and bottom of blog content.  

10. optimize your business page

If you’re using Facebook Ads to try and bring people to your Page, you’re going to want it to look professional. There are a few things to remember when optimizing your Facebook page:

• Keep it up to date: make sure you’ve got your latest contact details. This includes email address, contact number, and if necessary, hours of service and physical address.
• Description: write a concise description of your business. Make sure it’s exactly to the point and clearly communicates what it is your business does. Don’t use unnecessary jargon just to make the description longer.
• Cover photo: make sure you include an enticing cover photo that is in line with the brand message.
• Profile photo: generally this will be your business’ logo.   

Following these 10 tips is a sure way to increase engagement for your business’ Facebook page.