Social Media Marketing: 4 Ways to Improve Your Facebook Engagement
When it comes to social media marketing, engagement is crucial, and Facebook is one of the best avenues to get the most out of it.
Despite the fact that Facebook is apt for social media marketing and a key source for customer engagement, several companies are not approaching the social network in the right way when it comes to business. Below is a set of 4 tips you can use in your social media marketing strategies to improve your Facebook engagement and get the most out of the social network for your business or brand.
1. KISS: Keep It Short and Simple
People, particularly experts in a given field, feel as though Facebook is the perfect place to showcase their talent and boast about their services over a competitor’s. While Facebook is a great place to capitalize on watchful eyes, it is the wrong place to bore potential leads to tears with long, drawn-out posts explaining what you do and how you do it. This is a step best left to the lead nurturing phase of a relationship, and it is the wrong way to approach social media marketing. In fact, a recent study shows that the optimal number of characters for an engaging Facebook post is 80. By keeping your posts short, to the point and full of engaging content (Point 3) people will feel more compelled to engage with your brand and find out more about you. While you may be able to write paragraph after paragraph of self-touting information, Facebook users are not looking for that. So, to sum up, keep it simple!
2. Nobody ‘Likes’ a Showoff
That holds true for both the real world and the world of social media marketing. Social media is about being social, and one of the least social things a brand can do is post content that is purely self-promotional. (This holds true for parties as well, by the way.) LinkedIn is a network designed around the concept of promoting services and expertise, and Facebook is not. Like we mentioned above, engagement arises out of commonalities, not from promotional posts. Share information, ask questions, and get visitors to your page interested in carrying on a conversation.
3. Engagement Only Happens if People are Encouraged to Enagage
We noted above that you’ll need to post updates with engaging content. Now you may find yourself, asking, “Well, how can I have engaging content that is short and simple?” There are two answers to that question that have proven effective and easy to use: questions and pictures. Images and questions prompting an answer have the highest engagement rates of any for of content on Facebook. By asking short questions or prompting a comment like, “Provide a caption for this image!” people are seeing far more engagement than they do with other types of posts.
4. Do Your Research
Those first three tips are a cakewalk. They’re easy to follow, easy to employ and do not require much more work than simply following the given steps. This last tip is a little bit trickier. If you want to capitalize on views, shares, comments and other engaging aspects offered on Facebook, you’ll need to do you research to find out when your optimal times to post might be. Luckily, Facebook Insights offers tons of great information that can help, but you will have to find it, study it and adjust your Facebook strategy accordingly.
If you follow these four steps you are sure to see quite a bit of improvement when it comes to your Facebook engagement. Can you think of any other helpful tips that will add to you engagement levels? Tell us in the comments below or on Facebook or Twitter!
