Editor's Note: Brenda Savoie is a content marketer and English Tutor who writes at BestWritingClues. Today she joins us to discuss 10 simple ways Facebook marketers can engage their audience.
There's hardly a business owner or marketing expert who hasn’t realized this: social media marketing is the best way to enhance brand image and user engagement. Although everyone knows this, we constantly see bad examples of social media marketing. Facebook, as the largest social media network, is the place where we see brilliant marketing strategies in action, but we also see undermining techniques that can easily ruin a business.
The biggest question for a Facebook marketer is this: how do you get people engaged with your post? You can’t expect them to check your page on a daily basis. They are surrounded by ads and information, so you have to do something special to earn their attention.
A Unique Approach
Maria Popovich, marketing expert at BestEssays, emphasizes the fact that Facebook content shouldn't be overly promotional:
"[Facebook audiences] want to connect with your brand in a way that makes it part of their lifestyle. That’s the direction Facebook marketing should aim for: developing close connection with the brand’s users, and engaging them through personalized posts."
How do you achieve high engagement with each post we publish on your Facebook pages? Here are 10 tricks to get you started:
1. Start a Contest
People like contests so much that they specifically search for ones they can join. Contests with valuable prizes are a great way to attract more traffic towards your Facebook page. However, it’s also a great way to engage your current followers. First of all, you’ll ask them to do something in order to enter the contest. For example, you’ll ask them to like and share the post, and drop a comment on it. Then, most people will repeatedly visit your page to see if the winners are announced.
Contests are awesome because they get people excited to try your brand.
2. Invest in Facebook Ads
No matter how awesome your posts are and how carefully you plan their timing, not everyone from your target audience will see them. Thanks to an advertising method that Facebook calls Page Post Engagement adverts, you can keep up with all your followers and reach new ones at the same time.
3. Ask Your Questions
So you want to know more about your target audience? Of course you do! To get all information you need, you rely on data from all kinds of sources. That’s important, but so is direct communication. Facebook is the perfect platform for that. Why don’t you just ask your followers what they expect from your brand and what improvements they would like to see?
These types of questions engage people because they encourage them to talk about themselves. You can do this by asking questions through status updates, but you can also publish polls or surveys on your Facebook page.
4. Call Them to Action
Posting high-quality content all the time makes a true difference, but you won’t see great results if you fail to include a clear call to action. Be direct and simply ask your followers to engage. Ask them to like, share, and comment. Such a call triggers their need to contribute towards something they like.
5. Enhance the Visual Appeal of Your Page
A single relevant image can boost the engagement on your page more than a brilliant textual status update. People are visual creatures. The statistics are interesting, to say the least: 51% of B2B marketers made visual content a priority in 2016. B2C marketers place even greater importance on visual marketing when compared to B2B marketers.
Here’s the lesson: thrive on visuals! The cover and profile photo are important, so make them super attractive. Keep including relevant images, infographics, and videos in the posts you share.
6. Check Out the Competitors
How do you become better than your competitors? You observe what they are doing and you offer something more creative, more useful, and more cost-effective to the same audience. The trends in social media marketing are dictated not only by the consumers, but by the competition as well. When you’re in such a competitive environment, there are only two things you can do: adapt or die. Of course you’ll adapt!
Stalk the most successful competitors. What are they doing differently to engage the Facebook audience? You won’t copy their strategy, but these insights will help you improve your own approach.
7. Get Traffic from Other Channels
Your social media strategy is probably not limited to Facebook. You’re also trying to build presence on Quora, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and other online communities. You can drive traffic from there to your Facebook page. All you have to do is include a link to your Facebook page in the description. Ad links to important Facebook status updates in the updates you post on other social media. You can get people to join the conversation on Facebook if you show them how effective it is.
8. Experiment with Your Content Format
You already know you should include images and videos to make your posts more attractive, but that’s not all. To engage your Facebook audience, you should try expressing your status updates through different types of content. Instead of adding a video from another source to your status update, why don’t you just turn your own words into a video? Instead of attaching a stock image to make the post visually appealing, why don’t you create an infographic that expresses the text in visual format?
Explore with different types of content and see what your audience likes the most.
9. Find the Right Posting Frequency
Many Facebook marketers make the same mistake: they think that more posts lead to greater engagement. That’s not necessarily the case. "Two posts a day" used to be a golden rule for Facebook marketing, but that can work only if you have a large audience. A study by Hubspot showed that for a smaller base of followers, posting twice per day will result in 50% lower engagement per post.
Find out what works for you. It’s not about the quantity of posts. It’s mainly about the quality. If you notice that your audience likes what you’re doing and you have more things to say, keep posting more frequently. If you’re not getting them engaged enough, improve the quality before you start working on the quantity of posts.
10. Mind the Timing
Even though Facebook is available 24/7, it doesn’t mean you can post any time. If you want better post engagement, timing is crucial. For this purpose, you have to find out when your target audience is on Facebook. If you’re targeting singles in their 20s, for example, you wouldn’t be able to reach them late at night or early in the morning. If you’re targeting people with office jobs, you won’t reach them during office hours.
The best times to post on social media are different for each business, but you can get hints from different studies. Your followers give you hints, too. Try posting at a different time every day to see when you can get people engaged.
Engagement is hard, but obtainable
Encouraging people to like, share, and comment on your posts is not a completely straightforward task. You have to catch the vibe of your audience and stay visible to them at all times. But with a robust strategy and thoughtful audience analysis, it's possible to master your Facebook presence and keep the audience engaged.
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7 Elements of Highly Effective Facebook Marketing
Facebook Advertising and Targeting
Mastering the Facebook Sales Funnel
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