Increasing facebook engagement

       Today we are going to dive deeper into the topic of engagement on your social media. Specifically, Facebook page and post engagement. This Hootsuite article defines engagement as “any action someone takes on your Facebook page or one of your posts.” First, the act of having social media profiles for your business means that you are trying to increase brand awareness. Second, the purpose of posting on social media is to get your target audience to interact with your business, to engage, and ultimately to give them a call to action. We are going to discuss a few ways that will help to increase engagement on your Facebook page. 

KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE  
       Take the time to learn about your audience. Try to find out what kind of content they would enjoy seeing from a business like yours. Learning what kind of posts will bring the most engagement is going to take time and be a trial and error process. Fortunately, Facebook offers a great feature called Facebook Insights that will reveal data on your posts. Use this to your advantage! From this you can learn what your audience positively responds to and things that don’t work at all. Remember, it is about what content that your audience will respond to, not just something that YOU think would make a great post.

QUESTIONS & POLLS  
       One tactic that many Facebook users use is asking a question or starting a poll. This is a quick trick that is used to grab someone's attention and give an automatic call to action. Asking a question will spark engagement in the comments and maybe even a discussion. This would be organic content that was directly produced from your original post. Put thought into the questions or polls that you post. Questions/Polls that spark your audience to think, provide them with something of value or give them an opportunity to share their own opinion will produce better results than simply asking if they would like to join your mailing list. 
 
QUALITY IMAGES 
Quality is key. On average, Facebook posts that contain a photo or graphic are more likely to see a higher engagement rate than a post without. But more than simply adding a photo, I believe that using a high quality image will increase the likelihood of engagement even more. People love looking at beautiful and intriguing photos! It is something that naturally catches our eye. The best part is that creating quality photos has only gotten easier. Great images can be captured with just the camera on your cell phone. And even if that is something that you are not confident in, fear not! Stock photos are always another option that is also widely used. There are many places that offer free or purchasable stock photos. Here is a resource for free stock photos that you may find helpful.

TAKE ADVANTAGE OF VIDEOS  
Posting quality videos is going one step further than posting a great image. Videos are an amazing tool that are sure to increase engagement. Again, you don’t need fancy equipment and an expensive editing program to create a video for your audience. Your cell phone will work for this too! One easy way to add video content is to take advantage of the Facebook live (and Instagram live) features. 
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BOOST YOUR POSTS 

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Facebook offers a simple way of promoting your business and that is using the ‘boost’ feature on your posts. It is a paid form of advertisement but it is simple, easy to use and will definitely increase the engagement on your post. After you post, there should be a ‘boost’ option in the bottom right corner. 

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There are many other ways to increase the engagement on your Facebook posts. Hootsuite offers many useful tips when navigating the world of Facebook Engagement. The most important takeaway is to make sure the content you are posting is something that will capture the attention of your audience and spark a desire to engage. Make sure your posts are offering something of value, don’t post if you are trying to just fill the void. Offer tips, information, free shipping, discounts or ask a question. Check out more engagement tips here.  Once your audience has engaged on your post don’t forget to interact with them as well by responding to comments and questions. This will help build the momentum for your future posts. 
 
If you have any requests on topics you would like to hear more about, be sure to let us know. ​​