Contents
Why Engagement On Facebook Matters
How To Drive Facebook Engagement
10 Facebook Engagement Post Ideas To Educate & Entertain Your Audience
Driving engagement on your Facebook posts can be challenging. Even if your social media marketing budget is high and you have a dedicated team of social media marketers creating and posting content on Facebook, engagement might be elusive.
That is even before we consider the steady decline in organic Facebook engagement rate in the last few years. A 2018 study by Buffer and BuzzSumo, which analyzed more than 43 million posts from the top 20,000 brands and businesses, revealed that all Facebook pages saw more than a 50 percent decrease in engagement.
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Another key statistic from the study is this: the popular brand pages on Facebook increased their frequency of posting by 24 percent from Q1 2017 to Q2 2018. And the brand pages that posted the most (>10 times per day) saw the steepest decline in their engagement rates.
Does that mean you should reduce the number of Facebook posts you publish? The key is to focus on quality over quantity with your social media posts.
What Is Facebook Engagement?
Engagement, in simple terms, refers to the likes, shares, comments, link clicks, and reactions generated by a Facebook Post, video, Story, news item, and others.
Why Engagement On Facebook Matters
Facebook is the largest social media network in 2022 in terms of monthly active users (MAU) with 2.9 billion of them, 0.7 billion more than YouTube in second place.
Brands, therefore, have a tremendous opportunity to reach a wide audience demographic and generate business value.
In addition, audience engagement on Facebook drives a wide range of benefits for brands on and off the platform.
- Brand Awareness: A higher engagement rate on Facebook helps drive brand awareness as more people see your brand posts and learn about your company and your products and services. This includes your target audience in different geographic locations and the demographic whom you’re not actively targeting.
- Social Proof: A high volume of likes, shares, and comments on your posts helps build trust with your Facebook audience. It establishes you as a trustworthy brand whom your audience wants to engage with and be an ambassador of.
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- Algorithm: If your Facebook posts consistently receive high engagement, it’s a signal to the Facebook algorithm that people find value in your content and want to consume more of it. By staying on the right side of the algorithm and getting a higher placement on your audience’s newsfeed, your posts gain more visibility and reach.
- Competitive Advantage: If your Facebook posts get more engagement than your competitors, it leads to more conversations around your brand. Moreover, your followers are likely to recommend your brand to their friends and family, giving you an advantage over other brands in your industry.
How To Drive Facebook Engagement
We’ve understood the importance of driving Facebook post engagement and how it benefits your company. Now, let’s look at some of the best practices to drive engagement and do it consistently.
Share When Your Audience Is Active
The optimal time to share a Facebook Post varies for each brand. However, to drive engagement, be aware of when your audience is more likely active on Facebook and design a posting schedule around that time.
How can you know this?
Facebook Page insights.
Navigate to the ‘Post’ tab in Facebook Page insights and you’ll find data on when your fans are online each day of the week.
Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm ranks content based on:
- Recency
- Popularity
- Type of content
So when you share content while your audience is active on Facebook, it will appear at the top of their newsfeeds and help you drive engagement and reach.
Be Consistent With Your Publishing Schedule
If according to your publishing schedule, a Facebook post must be published at 4 PM on Friday, make sure it goes out. Your audience is probably accustomed to seeing your post appear on their newsfeeds like clockwork, so don’t disappoint them.
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Being consistent with your publishing schedule will help drive engagement to your Facebook posts.
It also can drive other benefits such as gaining your audience’s trust and building and strengthening your relationship with them.
Quality > Quantity
Your audience’s Facebook newsfeed is inundated with numerous pieces of content. It’s gotten to the point where they’re perhaps contemplating unfollowing a few pages to refresh their feed. You don’t want to be part of their refresh.
Ensure your Facebook posts add value to your audience’s lives by entertaining or educating them. The occasional fun post is fine, but your audience shouldn’t feel like your posting schedule is designed to occupy their newsfeeds from time to time without really gaining any value.
Focusing on quality would mean you publish one or two posts a day, but to drive engagement, that might still be enough if it’s genuinely valuable to your audience.
Engage And Interact
At times, it can be difficult to generate new Facebook post ideas. Especially if your publishing frequency is high, your company hasn’t done branding activities of late, and nothing Facebook post-worthy is planned.
In such times, it’s a good idea to engage in a meaningful way with other brand pages and their posts. It can be a simple comment that’s relevant to the subject of their Facebook post or even a ‘Like’, acknowledging and appreciating their efforts.
Engaging with other Facebook pages can benefit you in many ways.
It can:
- Bring visibility to your brand
- Help gain new audiences
- Showcase your brand personality
Social media, after all, isn’t just about your brand. So, where possible, it’s a good practice to interact with other brands and their audience.
Publish Timely Posts
Don’t restrict yourself to sharing Facebook posts exclusively about your brand. Sure, it might help you achieve key business goals and uphold your brand’s reputation on social media. However, it doesn’t help diversify your content and engage your audience in different ways.
It’s always a good practice to stay abreast of world events and industry developments and publish content around them while staying true to your brand identity.
Whether it’s the Super Bowl, a music show by a popular band, or an awards ceremony, publish posts that connect your brand products and services with those events, and you’ll end up delighting and engaging your audience.
While publishing event-based posts, make sure you use relevant and trending hashtags (but don’t use many!).
Facebook Post Ideas For Engagement
For many brands and individual content creators, Facebook is one of the main social media platforms to connect with their audience. Facebook helps brands to reach the right audience at scale. This, however, doesn’t mean any type of content will drive engagement and interaction on the platform. Your posts must be value-driven and educate and entertain your audience.
Let’s look at some ways to drive Facebook engagement.
Ask Questions To Prompt Discussion
You can either run a poll where your audience can voice their opinion by selecting one of the available options, or you can create a yes-or-no question that triggers a discussion in the comments.
Why this works:
- It gives people a reason to share their thoughts and opinions
- It’s a two-way conversation between the brand and its audience
- People love to engage with their favorite brands and have their voices heard
- Comments and engagement (likes and reactions) will help the post to reach newer audiences
Given these benefits, it’s important to understand how your question might be perceived and the feedback it might generate from your audience. So, it’s best to keep your questions simple and clear while giving your followers an incentive to engage with your post.
Customer Success Stories
Customer success stories are a great way to drive Facebook post engagement.
Often, these are data-driven and give your audience an insight into the benefits of using your products or services. They also bring out the story of a customer’s first-hand experience of using your product or service and benefiting from it.
This engagement post idea might be a timely one if you’re planning a product launch, giving your prospects and customers the opportunity to make use of the product demo or trial.
This type of post, therefore, might not only drive engagement but also help generate leads and sales.
Caption This
The premise of this Facebook post idea is simple: you post a photo and ask people to write a suitable caption. You can incentivize them by including this line as part of your post: “The best captions will be re-posted on our timeline”.
This type of engagement post works because you’re challenging people with something that’s doable, fun, and engaging. It encourages people to get involved and connect with your brand, while they also get visibility for their efforts and creativity.
You can even go a step further and ask people to post “wrong answers only”, which adds a fun element to the exercise.
Data Visualization
This is another data-based Facebook engagement post idea that will capture your audience’s attention.
The visualization can either be part of a case study that you’ve created or a standalone content piece that offers unique insights or takeaways.
If it’s part of a case study and you’ve shared the link to it, people will be encouraged to click through and read it. On the other hand, if it’s an image or infographic, people might engage by reacting to or commenting on your post.
Use cases of data visualization are aplenty and you can use it to engage and educate your audience.
Giveaways And Contests
If you have a new Facebook brand page and you want to increase its visibility and reach, then a giveaway or contest-based post can help achieve your campaign goals.
The idea itself is simple: you create a Facebook post announcing to your audience what they need to do and what’s in it for them.
A sample copy would read: “Enter for your chance to win exciting gifts and offers. To be eligible, all you need to do is ‘Like’ our Facebook page and share this post on your timeline. For more details, visit your-websitenamedotcom”.
Even popular Facebook pages with a plan to generate buzz can create giveaways and contest-based posts to engage and connect with their audience.
People love participating in contests where they have the opportunity to win prizes. That’s why this type of post is particularly effective.
Landmark Day Posts
Easter, Halloween, International Women’s Day, World Earth Day, Children’s Day, New Year’s Day - these are some great occasions to drive audience engagement with a contextual Facebook Post.
Posts with a festive flavor help humanize your brand and provide diversity to your social media marketing strategy.
For example, if you’re celebrating International Women’s Day at your company, you can create a video of all your female employees describing the significance of the occasion, and share it as a Facebook post.
Likewise, any festive celebrations held at your company can be used to drive social media engagement.
Memes
Memes are one of the most powerful ways to drive Facebook engagement.
According to data, memes drive ~10 percent more reach and 60 percent more organic engagement than conventional marketing graphics.
Memes allow people to relate to situations, have a laugh, and even streamline content consumption. They are a great alternative to text and data-based posts as well.
One of the foremost reasons you must consider memes as part of your social media strategy is the shareability factor.
It’s easy for a meme post to go viral if its tone and timeliness are combined, making it instantly recognizable and relatable to your audience.
Go Live
Facebook Live videos get six times higher engagement than regular videos. That’s evidence enough for your brand to include Facebook Live content as part of your strategy.
Whether it’s a company event, a Q&A with a celebrity, or a celebratory occasion, Facebook Live is a must.
To ensure your Live broadcast is viewed by your followers, ensure you create a post informing them about when you’re going Live and the subject of it.
Also, make sure you engage with your audience by inviting questions from them and responding to them on Live video.
Share Industry News
Sharing relevant, timely news bytes from your industry informs and engages your audience.
This is especially true for B2B brands as news content informs your audience of current and future trends, current market activity, and more.
Sharing this type of content on Facebook also helps gain your audience’s trust by providing them value and keeping them abreast of the latest industry developments.
#OnThisDay Post
Share content of historical significance, relevant to the industry you’re in, from years or decades ago to give people a sense of nostalgia.
Your Facebook post could be a collage of your company at the time of inception and its contemporary.
Other examples that make for a great #OnThisDay post include:
- A celebration of the birthday of a company’s founder
- A company event from last year
- An invention that revolutionized the industry
In Summary
Facebook is the biggest social media platform and offers enormous potential for brands to connect and engage with the right audience at scale. Driving engagement on Facebook offers brands a host of benefits, including brand awareness, gaining new audiences, being rewarded with higher placement on the newsfeed by the algorithm, and so on.
To drive Facebook engagement, brands must:
- Share content when their audience is active
- Be consistent with their publishing schedule
- Publish timely posts from within and outside their industry
- Publish quality content
- Interact and engage with other brand pages
Facebook engagement post ideas can help brands to educate and entertain their audience. They can employ any of the following engagement strategies:
- Ask questions
- Publish customer success stories
- Photo captions
- Data visualization
- Run giveaways contests
- Publish landmark day posts
- #OnThisDay posts
- Share industry news
- Publish memes
- Run Facebook Live
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