Despite popular belief, Facebook is still the most widely used social media networking channel. 1.62 billion people visit Facebook every day. And India leads this parade with a total strength of 270 million users followed by the US.
As of April 2020, males between 25-34 years of age and women between 18-24 constituted the biggest demographic group of Facebook users. (source – Statista)
However, recent times have also seen an increase in the number of senior citizens and boomers using the platform.
So, how can marketers benefit from these data surveys?
Marketers and advertisers understand that Facebook is a crucial platform for them to leverage if they want to reach a wide audience. As marketers or business owners, you would naturally want to be where your customers are. But when there’s so much diversity, what can you do to reach the right audience and retain them?
This is where Facebook engagement can help you. All you need is the right strategy and a well-defined plan of action.
What is Facebook Engagement?
Let’s start from basics.
Facebook engagement calculates the total number of actions taken by a visitor on your page, post or adverts.
These engagements can include actions such as reacting to, commenting on or sharing an ad. It can also be while claiming an offer, viewing a photo or video, or clicking on a link.
Why does it matter?
Strong engagement on Facebook posts is one of the best ways to maximise your reach and build a community of followers.
Posts that have engaging content will attract attention from people who might tag their friends in the comments to let them know. Or they might also share it with their followers if the posts are really good.
So, engaging and appealing Facebook posts highly increase your chances of reaching a wider audience and attracting potential clients.
How is it calculated?
Likes+ Comments+ Shares = Total Engagement
(Total engagement/ Fans) = Facebook engagement rate
How Is Facebook Engagement Different from Facebook Reach?
The two words might form a similar meaning in your mind but Facebook engagement is relative to Facebook reach and their meanings differ a little bit.
Facebook reach refers to the number of people who have seen your post. It is the total number of unique views your posts (text, video) or ads get.
Facebook engagement, on the other hand, is the calculation of the total number of times someone interacted with your posts. These interactions are counted by the number of clicks, likes, shares, comments, and tags or mentions.
Facebook engagement is relative to Facebook reach in the way that the more engagement you get on your posts, the more likely it becomes for that post to reach more people.
For example– a Facebook page that gets 10 likes from the same set of people on a post will be the only ones who will be shown more posts from that page. However, if some of these 10 people interact with your post through commenting, sharing it with their followers or tagging their friends, this will nudge Facebook to show your future posts to those new people too.
13 Ways to Reshape Your Facebook Engagement Strategy
In the latest development to its ranking signals, Facebook’s new algorithm is about giving more transparency and autonomy to its users. With its “why am I seeing this post” feature, users get an idea about which pages they are interacting with the most, their favourite groups, which category of posts they “like” the most and so on.
In 2020, Facebook’s ranking signals depend on 3 major aspects-
– The kind of pages or people the user usually interacts with
– The type of post (text, video, audio, photo)
– The popularity and influence of the post
To improve your rankings, interaction, Facebook engagement and ultimately reach, you need to have a well-devised plan. But, you need to keep on updating and renewing these methods with the changing trends and target audience.
Most of the points mentioned below save a few are for you to increase your organic reach. Most of these ways are free, simple and extremely actionable.
1. Understand and Set Your Goals
If you have gone through our other guideposts you’ll see that this is always at the top of our list. This is so because every business is unique and has its unique set of requirements. Therefore, before developing a strategy you first need to decide what you are trying to achieve.
The most common goals that Facebook marketers keep working on to improve are to improve brand awareness and boost their sales and lead generation objectives. Other goals involve increasing community engagement, increasing web traffic, and growing brand audiences.
The strategies to each of these will differ from the other. That’s why it important for you to understand your objective based on your business type and your target audience.
2. Know Your Audience
Knowing your target audience is crucial because it lets you understand the kind of content you need to create depending on your consumer base.
There are lots of tools available on the internet which allow you to know your social media demographics. You can classify your audience based on gender, age, country, occupation and so on. You can use also use Facebook’s ‘page insight’ tool to get an idea about the people interacting with your page.
For example, if you have a music page featuring only western songs from the 80s, your target audience should not be solely Gen Z or millennials. They might like a few songs but your page’s interaction will come mostly from boomers and Gen X who listened to those songs in their early years.
3. Create Interactive Content
Your main aim of creating a Facebook page is to provide people with useful and necessary information right? Or at least that is what you started with initially.
Whether it be sports, entertainment, culinary, news, or memes, you want to tell your audience something. So, why make it boring? Just because it’s information, doesn’t mean it has to be one-sided. Lectures in classrooms are entertaining only when teachers and students interact with each other.
Therefore, make the exchange of information reciprocal. Conduct quizzes, do live Q&A sessions, have discussions in the comment section, ask people to share their stories, and so on.
Creating interactive content will also enable you to listen to your consumers and give you an idea about their needs and what kind of content they would like to see. The discussions will give you insights about their personalities and their interests.
4. Know When to Post
Let’s take a moment here to thank the growth of data and data analytics.
Sprout Social’s ‘best time to post’ research has given out some key DOs and Dont’s for Facebook engagement.
DOs
– Wednesday is the best day to post
– On Wednesday, engagement is the highest between 11 am to 1 pm.
– On other weekdays, 9 am to 3 pm is a good time to engage with audiences.
DONT’s
– Of all days, the engagement is lowest on Sundays.
– The least recommended times to post are early mornings and late nights.
5. Post on Facebook Groups
This is a new trend but private messaging and small groups are taking over public and online communities. Facebook is also shifting its focus from public pages to “private experiences.”
Hence, creating a Facebook page for your business and posting content solely there isn’t enough anymore. Having smaller groups can bring in more engagement and allow businesses to focus on catering to the individual interests of its members.
6. Maintain a Social Media Calendar
The biggest advantage of making and following a social media calendar is that you will hardly ever miss out on posting on important dates. With a planner, you can plan at the beginning of the year which dates are the most relevant to you and will need some great marketing initiatives and ad copies.
For example, if you are in the business of making sanitary tissues for women, you cannot afford to miss posting on Women’s day, sanitation day, environment day, and so on.
Apart from this, you can combine an analytics tool along with your calendar to keep track of the performance of each or a combination of posts. This will allow you to understand which posts are popular, how much engagement are they getting in terms of likes, shares, comments. What kind of content is more popular among your users? Is it videos or live stream or images? You can also take the help of SEO tools to understand if your SEO efforts are being met.
7. Mingle Various types of Content
With the social media calendar, you can also keep track of what kind of posts are becoming repetitive and if you need to change it.
Combine your Facebook page or groups with a variety of media. Consider using images, thought-provoking written posts, videos, Facebook stories, links, and live stream to distribute your content.
If a particular type of content works for you, then keep on enhancing it but don’t ignore the other elements.
8. Optimise Your Page for Mobile
“In April 2020, over 98 per cent of active user accounts worldwide accessed the social network via any kind of mobile phone.” – (Statista)
And you want active engagement on your posts right? Thus it’s extremely crucial that you mobile-optimise the page and your posts. The size of the images, font, thumbnail images will appear differently in a mobile phone than on your laptop.
Moreover, features like ‘Messenger’ is a mobile-only application by Facebook to message friends and family directly. So, if you want to message your users directing them towards new posts and events on your page, your page will need to look appealing on their mobile phones.
9. Leverage Video Content
In continuation to the earlier point stressing on the importance of mobile optimization, here’s another statistic.
Mobile-friendly video ads make up more than half of facebook’s video revenue. (Sprout Social)
And Facebook engagement is the highest on mobile-first videos as more and more people shift to accessing the platform from their phones.
Another important point to factor in is that the majority of these viewers watch the videos without sound. While you can’t neglect to put sound in your videos, but no sound makes it even more important to make your imagery catchy and appealing. Moreover, adding subtitles is important if the video has any dialogues in it.
A case study by Buffer found that square videos create more Facebook engagement over landscape videos by 35%. Square videos get more likes and comments than landscape Facebook videos.
10. Encourage Employee Advocacy
People believe what people say. What this means is that any brand’s products will be bought only when it has great customer reviews.
Therefore, to increase your organic reach, you can ask employees to get vocal – virtually obviously- about events and new happenings in the company. It can be about the launch of a new product and their experience with it, some exciting discussion they can’t wait to attend, and so on.
11. Prioritise Customer Relationships
Make sure that no comment or query on your Facebook page or groups goes unattended. Believe it or not but when people see a post they like, they want to interact with the creator in comments.
Brands or businesses that respond to their consumers always garner more interaction than those who don’t. This is so because when your reply to their comments or messages, it shows that you care about them enough to listen to them. Always be formal, courteous and respectful to your users.
12. Shorter Posts
People scrolling through their newsfeed on their mobile phones spend only 1.7 seconds to consume that piece of content.
That’s too less but that’s how much time you get to capture their attention. So, every piece of content you make has to look great and the messaging very short, captivating and to the point.
Your main aim is to create content good enough to capture their attention and make them stop scrolling.
13. Explore Facebook Ads and Boosts
Unfortunately, Facebook’s algorithms keep on changing which might make it difficult for people who aren’t pro-Facebook marketers yet to build their brand’s social image.
Here you can take the help of Facebook adverts and its ‘boost’ option to get your post in front of more people. This option allows you to target your posts’ visibility based on your audience’s demographics, your budget and the duration of the running of the ad.
Wrapping Up
A one-size-fits-all approach won’t work when you’re trying to develop an effective social media marketing strategy. But the only thing that must remain constant is amazing content, whichever your media be. Your content has to be short, crisp, appealing, captivating, and thought-provoking. You must give equal importance to the creation and curation of great photos, videos, stories, written posts, and more.
For a full-proof Facebook engagement buildup plan, you will need to combine both organic and paid means to grow the interaction on your page.
On that note, let’s interact in the comments section below. Tell us more ways that you have employed for your Facebook engagement building strategies.