You may be active on social media, but despite this, are finding it hard to drum up engagement in an organic way. There are ways of doing this with an advertising budget, but unless you have deep pockets to help you grow your following quickly, this isn’t always the best solution. So I’ve put together some top tips to help you organically increase your engagement levels on Facebook.
Photos & videos
Posts that have a photo or video attached are a lot more engaging than a post with just plain text. Get creative and edit your photos with stickers, or record a boomerang clip. Always think about how an image or video could catch someone’s eye as they scroll down their feed. You should also try to add captions to your videos for people who are watching in an area where it can’t be played out loud, or for those who are hard of hearing.
Ask questions and set up polls
Always think about quality over quantity when it comes to posting on social media, and, if possible, find a way of shaking up the norm when it comes to creating content. A great way to conjure up engagement is to ask a question at the start or the end of your post. This way, you’re encouraging your followers to reply and carry on the thread of conversation. You could also set up a poll which will give you a quicker, more concise answer to your question. Polls only allow two answers though, so use them about a question which doesn’t have tons of answers. You can choose how long the poll runs for, and then the number of votes will show up during its lifespan. You can then create a post with the poll results, thus starting another engaging conversation piece!
Write blogs and shout about them
Writing blogs should be part of your Digital Marketing strategy anyway, as they work well for SEO. Leanne, our former SEO/PPC Executive says: “This is because in blogs you can use longer-tailed keywords. Long-tail keywords are longer versions of your primary keywords (3 or 4 words); for example, if your target keyword is ‘digital marketing’, a long-tailed version may be ‘what is digital marketing’, as it is a more specific version of the broad keyword itself. This way, you are expanding your reach by tapping into more specific topics.
“Writing regular blogs will help with internal linking – the more internal links you have, the easier it is for Google to crawl your website, making you rank higher for target keywords and get your website indexed quicker. Blogs also help by answering users’ questions, enticing them to enquire, because – if you’ve done your job properly – you will come across as knowledgeable, trustworthy expert, i.e. a thought leader.”
From the point of view of social media, blogs are also a great source of content. As long as your blog isn’t time-sensitive, you can recycle them on your platforms as they are a never-ending source of knowledge and a great conversational piece. If the writer of the blog has quoted another article, you should tag the source in your posts as there is a good chance they will retweet or reshare your post to gain exposure for themselves, introducing your brand to all their followers in the process.
Outreach into Facebook groups and pages
You can now ‘like’ pages as your own page. Just go onto the page you want to like, click on the three dots button and you will see an option ‘like as your page’, then select your business page from the list. You can now comment, like and share as your business page. The more you like and comment on other business pages, other users will see your name more and more. Hopefully, they will be intrigued enough to click on your page and, if the content and branding is up to scratch, the chances are they’ll your page.
You can also join groups as your business page. It is a similar process to liking as your page, but you just click ‘join group’ and it will come up with a list of your pages that you can join. This is the perfect way to communicate in any groups that specialise within your industry, such as a local business networking group or community group.
Find the perfect time to post
If you are new to boosting your business on social media, you may not know there is a science behind when to and when not to post! You can usually do a Google search to discover when the best times to post are for each platform, but you should also consider when your ideal customer would be online. If you post at the right times for your customer, you will find they are more likely to engage in the moment.
And there you have it. Try these steps out and you are sure to see a rise in engagement within your end of month report.
