Social Media Best Practices: Encouraging Facebook Engagement

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Congrats, your company is on social media! You’re creating and sharing awesome content and gaining quite the following! Now you’re ready to really kick it up a notch. How? By increasing fan engagement on your Facebook posts. It can be tricky to know exactly where to start, so we’ve put together a couple tips to get you started.

Congrats, your company is on social media! You’re creating and sharing awesome content and gaining quite the following! Now you’re ready to really kick it up a notch. How? By increasing fan engagement on your Facebook posts. After all, no one wants to put time and resources into a post that’s met with only crickets. With the ever-changing Facebook landscape, it can be tricky to know exactly where to start, so we’ve put together a couple tips for improving Facebook engagement and leveraging your fans to their fullest potential.

Know your audience

If you haven’t taken the time yet to get to know your audience, this is your first step; everything that follows will in one way or another be based on this information. So what do you need to know? The basic details you’ll need includes, are they primarily male or female ? How old are they? Where do they live and work? What lifestyle do they lead? Do they talk with a certain lingo or tone? Do they prefer written posts or videos? And the list goes on. Knowing these things will help you to craft your message and better connect with your fans. Facebook’s built-in analytics tool can help determine some of these things. Otherwise, you can simply ask them these questions, learn their interests and their humor. If you can do this, the rest will be easy.

Timing is everything

Now that you know who you’re talking to, you need to decide when it’s best to talk to them. Brands with the most engagement post at the same time every day, typically around noon, EST. This catches the east coasters around lunch time when they’ll be taking a break from business to do some browsing. It catches west coasters while they’re sipping their morning coffees, engaged in their morning email and social media routines. Additionally, posts shared around 1pm are more likely to get the most shares while those shared around 3pm are likely to get the most clicks. Check out this infographic for more information about post timing.

However, these times are averages. Every brand is different; to determine when the best time to hit your audience is, you’ll want to do some testing. Take a week or two (depending on how often you post) and alternate the individual time you publish each post. From here you should be able to get an idea of what time your audience is most engaged. Facebook’s insight tool also allows for a deeper look at when your audience is most often on Facebook.

Quality over quantity

There is a lot of pressure to remain relevant to your followers but please believe it when we say that posting every few minutes is not the way to do it. First of all, it would certainly be difficult to come up with that much interesting content; posting too much information that does not interest your followers will only cause them to tune you out. Make your posts worth their time, worth sharing, and something that they can look forward to! Every audience will define quality differently, so again, it’s super important to get to know yours!

Pay attention to your flops

Remember: what can be measured can be managed. This is why it’s important to track your post engagement. You’ll be able to get a solid grasp on which posts your followers and their networks are most interested in and what things are better left unsaid (on Facebook anyways).

Don’t be afraid to spend a little bit of money to increase post visibility

It’s a simple rule, the more people that see your post, the higher the engagement count. If you’re looking to drive comments, likes and shares, you shouldn’t be afraid to put some money behind driving more eyes to the post. There are a few ways you can do this; from boosting a post using Facebook’s native platform to utilizing a third-party tool (like SocialToaster) to easily allow your Superfans to share your content on their networks.

Connecting and engaging with your fans on Facebook can be tricky but it’s absolutely necessary. At SocialToaster, we know this and we’ve got the expertise to help your brand succeed on social. To start fully engaging with your fans, contact us today!

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