6 Tips to Make Your Facebook Campaign more Engaging

Content, data visualisations and social media are hot topics in the digital marketing industry currently. Brands are focusing on increasing engagement with their fans, customers and users. Facebook is of course the most widely used platform to interact and create social buzz around potential and existing customers.

According to research by Buddy Media, retail brands that write a post in less than 80 characters on Facebook tend to receive 66% higher engagement as compared to longer posts.

To increase engagement on Facebook, brands should not just focus on getting more ‘likes’ and comments on their posts but should place emphasis on being relevant and personalised for the fans.

Here are 6 tips to increase engagement on Facebook:

Use Post Targeting

Facebook’s improved Page Post Targeting feature allows brands to segment and target their fans according to the relevancy of the post. This function is extremely important in driving the right responses that help to analyse customer behaviour. Facebook now allows you to target fans according to gender, relationship status, educational status, age, location, language and interested in – men or women.

Post targeting will also allow brands to check how many fans or users are selected in a specific category. It also makes it easier to analyse how the post was targeted to specific fans. This can be used to make posts more interactive and fun, for instance, asking questions to seek opinions about products or any other activities. This function is very useful for those brands that target specific markets or people.

Visualise Your Posts

Facebook offers 6 types of posts: a text only post, a photo, a link, a question, a platform post and a video. Personally, I am a fan of visualisations. According to many social media experts, research and Facebook, photos tend to create much more engagement than other kinds of posts.

Posting anything with an image increases the chance a post to be noticed and create interest in fans. A message can also be communicated by adding it manually in an image. Some websites like Rottenecards allow creating your own ecard with a message. Memes are also a fun way to engage fans. These can be created with the help of Photoshop.Memegenerator can also be used for some quick wins.

Personalise the Interaction

Personalisation of posts or even products could be a good strategy to make fans feel important. Asking fans for their opinions about a product, logo or new product name works as a good strategy to create engagement. Giving authority to customers can result in improved sales and engagement on social media platforms like Facebook. The Facebook pages of Tesco and Oreo display a perfect example of personalisation and how to give value to their fans’ opinions and contributions.

Frequency and Timing of the post

Timing is extremely significant to improving the response rate on a social media platform. As pointed out in the research by Buddy Media, the best time to post on Facebook is between 8 PM and 7 AM. People don’t tend to notice or share posts at working hours. Research also revealed that posts that are displayed more than 3 times a day, don’t create much engagement as compared to the posts that are shared just one or two times a day.

Diverse Posts and Competitions

Posts should not just be limit to photos and text. Diversity keeps a social campaign’s engagement consistent as fans tend to get bored easily. Different types of posts should be updated regularly which can include questions, fill in the blank and competitions. Questions can help to gather data about user or customer behaviour, market research and most importantly to provide value to fans’ feedback.

Measure the Engagement

Analysing and measuring Facebook data can not only help in understanding customer behaviour but will also help to create more engagement by recognising the strengths and weaknesses of the campaign. Free data provided by Facebook Insights can be used to gain knowledge about how well a campaign or a post did on Facebook. Brands can measure weekly and monthly percentage changes, percentage of active fans in comparison to hidden fans, geographic location of fans and amount of likes, shares and fan posts on the wall.

It is highly important to check how many fans ‘unliked’ or ‘unsubscribed’ to the brand page. This is important because brands should be aware of the posts that don’t work well and the ones that work the best. Also, fans tend to hide content from any brand without ‘unliking’ them. This should be monitored to find out if specific fans are seeing posts quite frequently on their news feed.

All these factors play a key role in creating more engagement with fans or customers and will reap high benefits in the form of increased customer satisfaction and improved profitability.