4 Facebook Marketing Tips That Will Boost Engagement

Early this year in 2018, Facebook implemented an update on their newsfeed algorithm that has affected the engagement rate of a number of Business Pages on Facebook. In essence, this recent algorithm change prioritizes posts that encourage meaningful interactions and conversations between people.

For businesses, this means that those who still practice engagement bait (e.g., tag 10 friends for a chance to win!) will see a significant dip in engagement, while those whose posts have interesting content that people will genuinely interact with will see a rise. Facebook, therefore, is explicitly pushing brands to rethink their tactics in spurring engagement from their audiences.

Engagement is key for every social media marketing strategy. Merely posting content on your social media pages is not enough—it’s essential to have your audience actually interact and engage with your brand, either by liking or reacting to your post, commenting, or sharing it with their friends. Here are a few Facebook marketing tips that will effectively boost engagement:

1. Curate valuable and meaningful content

While one of the main goals of social media marketing is to promote your business, your social media posts shouldn’t be all about you all of the time—the golden rule of content curation says only 20% of your content should be self-promotional.

Instead of creating content for your brand, shift your focus on creating content for your audience. Your posts should aim to spark emotion in your target audience so that they are compelled to engage with your brand and share your content. The following types of content typically work best in prompting audiences to interact with your brand:

• Humorous images
• Heartwarming and inspirational stories
• How-to videos, tips, and practical hacks
• Breaking news, opinion content, and research findings
• Live videos

An essential step before creating valuable and meaningful content is to know who your audiences are and to understand their unique needs and challenges, their motivations, and what they care about the most.

2. Post at the best time and day of the week

Timing is everything for social media marketing. It’s important to know that Facebook’s news feed doesn’t post content chronologically; rather, its algorithm uses engagement signals (likes, comments, and shares) to determine how high and how frequently a particular content gets arranged on the news feed.

Posting at a time and day when your audience is most active increases the likelihood of engagement. While there isn’t a hard-and-fast rule as to when the best time and day of the week to post is, a few researches have concluded the following:

• Hootsuite: 12 noon to 3 PM on weekdays, except on Tuesdays. On Saturdays and Sundays, 12 PM to 1 PM.
• Hubspot: 1 PM to 4 PM on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays.
• Sprout Social: 1 PM on Wednesday to Sunday each week, with Thursday as the peak day for engagement. Every day between 9 AM to 3 PM.

3. Create compelling visuals

When it comes to generating engagement, visual content is seen to perform best—in fact, studies show that social media posts accompanied with images get 2.3 times more engagement than those without. Images typically stand out better compared to text-heavy status updates and posted links. However, it should be noted that the type of images you post makes a lot of difference.

It’s important for brands to show personality behind their business through the visuals they post. While relying on free and generic stock photos can save you on costs, it’s not as effective in driving engagement as professionally taken photos do. Make it a point to post photos that are specially designed and streamlined for your brand. Images containing faces of real people tend to draw people’s attention in more, as with photos with striking colors and landscapes.

4. Ask questions and return the favor

One effective way of making your social media posts actionable is by simply asking questions. By doing so, you do not only drive engagement up but also encourage insightful and meaningful responses from your audience directly. Get as creative as you can with the kind of questions you throw to your audience. Some examples include the following:

• What’s your favorite cake flavor?
• Who’s attending the biggest book sale this Friday?
• Happy Fourth of July! How will you celebrate our Independence?

It’s important to note that engagement isn’t a one-sided affair. Brands that reply to comments tend to score more interactions, so if someone makes the effort of commenting on your post or directly messaging your Page, you should return the favor by replying to them. Timing is also essential here; people expect a response within four hours of commenting. If you don’t have the time or resources to respond to every comment or direct message, it’s a good idea to set up a Facebook Messenger Chatbot to streamline the process.

Engagement is essentially what keeps social media marketing alive and thriving. It also offers the benefits of helping you increase your organic reach, boost SEO rankings, drive traffic to your website, and ultimately generate leads and boost sales for your business.

If you want to know more about social media marketing, Ilfusion has an experienced team of social media marketers and digital marketing specialists to give you a lending hand or two. Ilfusion also offers creative design, professional photography and videography, and copywriting services to supplement your social media marketing needs. Just give us a call at 888-420-5115, or send us an email to [email protected].

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