Increasing Facebook engagement can be tricky (due to the changes in the Facebook algorithm). But with the right strategies, at least you can navigate the right route and find the ones you actually need.
To simplify your work, I have curated 14 strategies for improving your Facebook engagement, along with the formula you might require during the process.
What Is Engagement On Facebook?
The action people take on your Facebook posts or page is known as Facebook engagement. Post engagement indicates that your posts are relevant to your target audience. This helps your posts perform better. When people see posts in their feeds that are relevant to them, they are more likely to interact with them.
How To Calculate Facebook Engagement Rate?
To calculate Facebook engagement, you need to understand the types of engagement on Facebook.
They are:
- Active Facebook Engagement = Number of likes, comments, and shares
- Passive Facebook Engagement = Number of post clicks, link clicks, video views, image clicks, post saves, etc.
You can find these metrics via Facebook insights and consider the data depending on your requirements. If you want to calculate your account’s total engagement, then consider the data from all your posts. However, if it's a specific one, include the data from that particular post.
The formula is:
Facebook Engagement Rate = [(Total Likes + Comments + Shares)/Total Reach] x 100
Why Should You Increase Facebook Engagement?
More Engagement Gives More Visibility In Facebook Search
Facebook pages having high levels of engagement naturally rank better in Facebook searches. That means people who are specifically searching for your niche in the Facebook search bar are far more likely to find your page!
Engagement And Connection Build Trust... Not Promoting Your Stuff
If your Facebook page is constantly promoting your product/service and not posting about anything that resonates with your audience, caters to their needs, or justifies the purpose of your Facebook Page, unfortunately, it isn't going to grow in engagement.
Since engagement is built on trust and credibility, its important you work towards it constructively.
Less Engagement Hurts Your Credibility
A thriving, growing Facebook page portrays that you are offering value and growing and building an amazing business. But a page which zero engagement has no interaction and signals that your content doesn't have anything valuable to share or help your audience. In that case, it's probably better not to have a Facebook page for your business at all!
14 Best Ways To Increase Facebook Engagement
Boosting Facebook engagement can be challenging. But that shouldn’t stop you from trying to increase it. If your current Facebook engagement rate seems low, you can try testing out the 14 strategies below and see if they work for you.
Learn How Facebook Algorithm Works
The Facebook algorithm is a set of rules that dictates what content appears in the news feed. It does this by looking at the below four criterias while pushing content into its user's feeds.
- Inventory: Facebook takes inventory of all the content that could appear in a feed.
- Signals: Facebook uses signals like the type of content and how often a user has interacted with that content to decide if it should appear in their feed.
- Predictions: Facebook uses predictive analysis to predict what each user wants to see in their feed.
- Relevancy scoring: Facebook uses relevance scoring to dictate how relevant content is to a user.
To increase the chances of your content appearing, you need to make sure it’s relevant to your target user, adds value, and is engaging, making it likely for them to interact with your posts.
Keep It Short And Crisp
If you can’t offer value to your audience, if you can't share something that’s either informational or exciting, don't waste their time with fluff posts. In this era of AI, everything we come across on social media is “fake” or “less human,” if we put it that way.
I would always advise you not to go that route because it isn't sustainable in the long run. Your audience has the capacity to distinguish a post that offers value, and that doesn't.
As for the Facebook audience, they are less patient as there’s a lot of distraction. So, to hook them instantly, keep your content short and crisp and ensure it adds some value if not humor.
Know When Your Audience Is Active
Creating great content is futile if your Facebook audience doesn't get to see it. So, it is well worth spending time understanding your community's online activity timing.
Honestly, you don't need to do that manually. You can take advantage of Facebook insights to understand your audience’s active schedule. However, if you require a more accurate analysis, Statusbrew can figure out the optimal times to post for you as per your local time zone.
If you see that most of your Facebook audience is active late at night, it doesn’t mean you need to get up in the middle of the night to post on Facebook. In that case, it's a great reason to schedule Facebook posts using a scheduling tool.
Plan And Move
Plan everything beforehand and then move ahead with your content. Decide and analyze what type of content resonates with your target audience, determine the posting time (now you know), and please don't share fluff.
I would advise you to maintain a social media content calendar. Something like this that offers a week/month-wise view. This organized approach will help you gauge that every content is getting out at the right time.
Focus On Interactive And Immersive Formats
A crushing visual content is what engages Facebook's audience the most. Have you ever stopped by a visually engaging post while mindlessly scrolling? Relatable?
Start by experimenting with different Facebook post formats, such as photos, carousels, video, animation, etc., to find out what works best. If you want to increase engagement, please don't go for stock images.
Go for images with striking colors or graphics that are meaningful and creative (basically original). Videos are the best (approx. 2 minutes), as 500 million viewers watch 100 million hours of video content on Facebook daily.
Utilize User-Generated Content
This is just another part of the immersive, engaging content (that we discussed) to increase engagement on Facebook.
Only posting about your own brand/product might become repetitive and less appealing after a certain time. At that point, UGC can be used to increase your Facebook engagement rate and conversions. Consumers are 2.4 times more likely to view UGC video content as authentic compared to branded content, as they love it when you share their content as yours.
Besides, you can easily reshare or repost that content to increase engagement. To start, you can collaborate with a UGC creator or partner with influencers with a large Facebook following to get more eyes on your business.
Respond, Engage, Add Value
Creating great content is one part of this process, but you also need to be ready for a high amount of engagement if it's that good. A high amount of engagement means people will comment on your content good/bad/ugly, and you need to have a plan to handle that.
Many times, businesses fail to respond to such interactions (negative ones), which results in an online reputation crisis. To avoid these escalations, either ensure to respond and engage back or pivot to social media management tools that help you manage these interactions.
With Statusbrew’s unified inbox, you can organize, manage, and view all your engagements across all connected channels. You can automatically route conversations to the right team, ensuring quick responses to your audience.
Interact With Facebook Stories
You might have seen that Facebook stories appear at the top of the news feed, which is a great placement for drawing eyeballs, considering that 500 million people use Facebook stories daily.
Posting Facebook Stories is an immersive way to stay connected to your audience. It's the closest you can get to them as they can be part/ witness of your real moments.
Through Facebook Stories, they can keep a tab on your daily activities, feel like they are part of it, and relate more. You can also converse through Stories through polls, Q&As, and more to engage them in the best way.
Go Live
Going live on Facebook once a week shows your involvement, and your audience is 4x more likely to watch Live videos. It's a great interactive opportunity where your audience gets to see you 1:1, engage with you through comments, etc.
You can build up the hype by announcing the live in advance, inviting an expert, and insisting your followers join the live on that particular date and time.
You can also repurpose your Facebook live videos into various short-form videos, creating fresh content.
Crosspost To Drive Traffic
Followers who are already interacting with your posts on other social platforms are great sources of engagement. You can crosspost content from Instagram to Facebook so that you don't have to recreate them and also gain insights into audience content preferences on different platforms.
If you see that crossposting the “right” posts is fetching you great results, keep at it. Just ensure they can find you on Facebook. Add a Facebook link to your website, email signature, and other social networks.
Use a Facebook plugin on your blog to showcase recent posts and embed Facebook posts in blog content. Include your Facebook URL on business cards and event posters, and add your Page as a link-in-bio on other social networks.
Use Broadcast Channels To The Fullest
If you have full or partial control of a Page, take advantage of Facebook's broadcast channels to share one-way messages like announcements, exclusive content, and more with your community. Using a broadcast channel helps you create and maintain a close-knit community that will ensure steady engagement.
These are the people who will be most loyally involved and bring in more people. Remember, word-of-mouth recommendation is the best possible marketing strategy to exist. Its organic and sustainable.
So, maintain your relationship with the existing users, and you will have a huge, engaging community in no time.
Run Contests
People like the feeling of winning, especially if it's prizes or giveaways. I have personally tried this and saw that when you conduct a particular contest, there is a lot of hype and engagement from followers for that particular period of time.
So, if you want to boost your Facebook engagement rate, you should definitely conduct such contests to get followers excited.
Boost With Ads
Boosting your top posts is totally worth the expense if you get to further extend your social reach and increase engagement on Facebook. It is really going to help you drive traffic from Facebook to your website, landing page, contest app, etc. Ensure you insert proper calls to action and links in all promoted posts.
If you can ensure to keep a budget for Facebook advertising, as its effective to generate traffic, leads, sales, and engagement for your business.
Test And Measure Everything
Whether you have just started or already have a long-running Facebook Page, I recommend you go for deeper analytics when it comes to analyzing your performance. I feel it's a good investment, as it's wise to have a very clear understanding of what's working and what's not from the very beginning, which can only be fulfilled by a social media analytics tool.
Statusbrew allows you to manage your presence on 7 social platforms, including Facebook, from the same dashboard. You can:
- Create, schedule (even in bulk), and publish posts to multiple social platforms at once.
- Manage conversations along with your team.
- Add internal labs to both posts and conversations for ease of segregation.
- Moderate comments under your Facebook posts and ads.
- Measure your performance and engagement.
- Gauge audience sentiment.
- Look into your audience demographics.
- Track your competitor’s business page.
- Share dynamic reports.
To know how it works, you can book a demo call/ leverage our 14-day free trial and see for yourself!
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is my Facebook engagement so low?
There could be a number of reasons for this. One could be a lack of engagement on your part. You need to interact with other's posts to increase your reach for yours. The other could be the content's lack of quality and other factors such as posting at the wrong time of day and outside audience active hours.
What are the best days to post on Facebook?
The days closer to the weekend, like Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, & Saturday, are considered the best days to post on Facebook.
How can I get 1000 likes on my Facebook page?
To get 1000 likes on your Facebook page, post engaging content regularly( have a fixed content calendar), use high-quality images, and run targeted ads. It's good to promote your page on other social media platforms and your website. And don't forget to engage with followers by responding to comments and messages promptly.
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