Engagement is one metric that you cannot afford to ignore as a brand owner, especially on social media. But that doesn’t have to mean a lot of spending on paid ads for your business. You can reach out and connect with your target audience via engaging, organic posts too.
On Facebook, engagement is all about the likes, comments, shares, and tags that you get on a post. It’s the action that people take when they find a post interesting and intriguing. It’s the exposure that you get when your post reaches your audience’s network. It doesn’t certainly have to be a link to click on; it can be an appealing image or an attention-grabbing video or even a thought-provoking text.
Brands are aware that Facebook is an unavoidable marketing platform for them to reach out to their target customers. The question is what exactly should they post that attracts their target market out of those 1.66 billion daily active users?
Well, it’s a few small things that bring the big change. But first,
What does my target audience engage with?
When posting on Facebook as a business, it’s not what you find interesting that counts. It’s what your target audience likes that matters.
1. Search terms, likes, and interest
Unless you know what they are looking for and what their interests are, you cannot offer them an ideal solution. Use Facebook Page Insights and find out what they respond to the most and what they already know.
2. Target personas
Create target personas to understand them even better. Once you have compiled of the high volume search-terms and interests of your demographics, creating these personas with an actual name helps you better.
3. Run Experiments
Since you don’t have historical data on what the target niche is interested in – the first place to start is by posting various forms of content and keeping an eye on how your audience responds. Once you know what they have already experimented with, you can create and post unique content that makes them converse with you or curious to gain more information about you.
There is no right or wrong as to what you can post on Facebook to create a buzz. However, you must keep note of what’s trending and popular.
Different types of posts that give your Facebook engagement a boost:
Boost Facebook Engagement using Image Posts
They say it right, “A picture is worth a thousand words”. Think about yourself. When you scroll through Facebook, you probably engage more with posts that contain images than those that don’t have one. It’s in our psyche to connect with images.
Perhaps, this is the reason why Facebook posts with a picture report higher engagement rates.
So what kind of an image works the best?
People will stop the cursor on an image that tells a story or is appealing enough to catch their eye. Or it should have an emotion that they can relate to. Besides, you can think of a high-resolution image that is relevant and picturesque. A close-up shot or a picture showing your customer works wonders.
Your mobile phone is all that you need to click that photo. Also, you don’t need to be a pro in Photoshop. Rather, you can use simple photos edited using a free tool such as Canva.
Boost Facebook Engagement using Videos
Video is another type of visual content that easily grabs the attention of people. You don’t need to spend hundreds of dollars to be able to capture a high quality video. Your mobile device is enough.
Make sure that your video compels your target audience in the first few seconds. Besides, keep it in portrait mode as the majority of users use a smartphone to scroll through Facebook.
Various video editing tools are available online for free. Use them to your advantage and let people engage more with your posts. For instance, Boomerang is a rage among the youngsters, and is fun when creating a short looping video.
Boost Facebook Engagement using an Album Post
If you want to share a large collection of relevant and interesting photos or videos, for instance, from a special occasion, then you can choose to create an album too.
Creating an album is easy with the following steps:
- Go to Photos section in your profile
- Click + Create Album
- Browse through your PC to add the pictures
- Click Open
- Give a name and description to the album while also choosing your audience and tagging your friends
- Click Post
Boost Facebook Engagement with a Carousel Post
What is Facebook Carousel?
Facebook carousel is your opportunity to use a single ad to display 10 images or videos at once. Carousel ads are successful among marketers because these ads captivate large masses and let you advertise different products or services through single space.
According to a report, these ads are 10 folds better than standard ads when it comes to generating leads.
A carousel ad is easy to create. You can go to Ads Manager and choose a carousel format-friendly marketing objective, whether it is brand awareness, lead generation, conversions, reach, or traffic.
When to create one:
When you have more content to display in less space, Facebook Carousel comes to your rescue. Use 5 to 10 images in one ad while giving each of these a unique headline, description and URL.
Boost Facebook Engagement using Instant Experience ad
Unlike a usual News Feed ad, an Instant Experience ad (earlier Canvas ad) provides enriching experience. You can include in it enticing images, videos, text, carousels, gifs, and what not. It acts like a fun canvas that makes people scroll through it and not switch to one of your competitors.
Instant Experiences are mobile-optimized and provide a full screen experience when someone clicks on them while using their smartphone. Creating a Canvas ad, you can visually highlight the products or services that you want to and even the brand itself.
When to use an Instant Experience ad:
When you want to grab complete attention of your target audience and create an impact via rich pieces of content, you need an Instant Experience ad. Select from a wide range of templates and go ahead with telling your brand’s story.
Boost Facebook Engagement using Feeling/activity option
Expressions never fail to arouse a feeling in people that they can resonate with. You can always add ‘feeling excited’ when launching a new product or service, or ‘feeling happy’ on achieving a milestone.
Let your Facebook fans know what you are doing, whether you are eating or reading. It increases their odds of sharing your content or commenting on your post or tagging someone.
Boost Facebook Engagement using Poll
Yes, you can organically increase your followers on Facebook and yet, it doesn’t work unless you create trustworthy relationships with your target customers and build a connection with them.
It’s a task to get people to engage with your posts on Facebook. That’s why you need different tricks to lure their attention and convert them into your customers. One of the tricks is to create polls that help you understand people better and know about even the smallest of their interests.
Visual content is great, but people are also highly likely to engage with questions. People love to respond to the questions you ask through polls. Otherwise, how would the Prime Minister of the country get chosen?
You can add a poll wherever you want on Facebook, whether it is in a group, or a post, a story, or on your page.
Boost Facebook Engagement using Watch party
A Facebook watch party is a live or pre-recorded video that provides people with a fun, co-viewing experience online.
It’s a great feature to use, if you have a Facebook Group. Members of the group can not only watch the shared video together, but comment on it and chat with each other too.
A host starts a stream and participants can either watch the stream live or a pre-recorded version of it.
The host is in control of the videos in the watch queue and the playback. The host can be a group of people too.
How to start a Watch Party:
- Go to your group
- Click Watch Party at the top
- Click Add Video and select the video that you want to add
- Click Add to Queue
- Click Done
You can add an interesting description to your Watch Party that makes people want to watch it and contribute to it.
Boost Facebook Engagement using Meme
In the recent past, memes have been a popular source of entertainment that engages people a lot. Memes are witty and fun. Use your knowledge about your audience to create memes that hold the potential to multiply your shares in number.
However, be careful not to abuse memes if it does not align with your brand.
How To Build A Relationship Through An Engaging Facebook Post
1. Use of emojis
Emojis are a great way to build an emotional relationship with your prospective customers on Facebook. When paired with a great caption, emojis increase your odds of getting more likes, comments and shares on your posts. Your brand appears as a welcoming one and people are more likely to remember what you shared, which increases your chances of being introduced to their friends.
2. Use of hashtags
Wondering if hashtags work on Facebook how they do on Instagram or Twitter? Well, maybe not. But yes, they do work on Facebook to some extent.
The secret is to not use hashtags for the sake of it. Different brands use hashtags for different reasons. Make it a part of your social media strategy if you want to learn what terms your audience is using and what all they are interested in so you can rotate the posts of their interest time and again.
3. Use of mentions
If your fans send a photo or text, share it with your followers to show that you value your community. Take permission and mention the creator in your post to show them gratitude.
A feeling of goodwill in your fans will result in higher engagement for your brand.
4. Use of GIFs
A GIF, precisely, fills the space between an image and a video. It’s a very short video in loop that appeals people visually and easily catches their attention at any time. The funnier gifs are, the better.
While you can use gifs on your Facebook business page, these are equally effective when you use them in Facebook ads. When an ad contains a gif, it becomes more click-worthy.
Using a GIF, you can tell a story to your Facebook followers and encourage interaction. A GIF prompts a conversation because it conveys your message effectively.
Due to its small size, a GIF is quick to process and upload on smartphones.
Now that you know what kinds of posts are actually engaging, and whether what you are posting is engaging or not, start redesigning your social media strategies. Create posts that contain questions to make people answer them or use SocialPilot’s AI Assistant to create engaging captions with ready to use templates.
Start a contest to give a boost to your brand engagement. Moreover, respond positively to people’s comments as it makes them feel trusted and noticed, which makes them engage with you in future too.
In the meanwhile, don’t forget to utilize the Boost Post feature of Facebook to make up for the possible decline in your organic reach. Boosting a post not only helps you appear in people’s news feeds first, but also reach a wider audience. Besides, you can track the performance of a boosted post as you go about it. Let’s see how to leverage the boost post feature to your advantage.
