1: Pose a Question
One of the simplest and most effective ways to kickstart a dialogue with your audiances is to ask them a question. Basically, you’re inviting a response. If fans can relate to the question and you find a way to leverage people’s interests or needs, they’ll find it hard not to answer.
Pair a question with an appealing visual
Here are some questions to ask:
· Specific: What’s your favorite…?
· Tips: How do you…?
· Experiences: What’s your favorite moment from experience/memory…?
· Edgy: Do you think…? (controversial question)
· Direct: Why do you…?
· Events: Who is going/Who attended…?
· Timely: Today is…, so what are you…?
2: Ask Fans to Make a Choice
A fun way to get your fans to engage with you is to publish a “this or that” post. Ask people to choose a side, pick a favorite, or make a choice between two things. An added benefit is that it can create a division among your fans, which can spark a dialogue in the comments.
Most of the time, those debates are good fun but be mindful of trolls. If you want to spark even more debate, you can always mix in a little controversy but avoid politics.
3: Post When Your Fans Are Online
People use Facebook at different times of the day. Some are on Facebook throughout the day, while others may only check it in the early morning or evening. If you’re randomly publishing a few posts each day, there’s a good chance some of your audience will miss them. By the time they check their feed, your content could be buried.
4: Share Relevant Images
A picture can say a lot more than a text post. A visually striking image can bring the rapid thumb-scroller to a halt. Images have proven time and again to improve engagement, especially when they tell a story or connect with the audience on a personal or emotional level.
The right images can help tell a story and encourage responses.
5: Engage With Other Brands
There’s no rule that says you need to limit your Facebook efforts to your own page. Wander the social landscape, post to other pages, and engage with brands when there’s synergy and a shared audience.
Engaging other brands can put you in front of a whole new audience.
6: Crowdsource Feedback
People love giving feedback. When you ask for input the right way, your audience will jump on board and be quick to respond. The added benefit is you can uncover opportunities to improve your business and delight your customers.
Strategic questions can boost engagement while eliciting the desired feedback.
7: Include a Call to Action
The standing rule for any kind of marketing is that if you want your audience to do something, you have to tell them to do it. Use a call to action in every post, whether it’s to prompt a comment, share, opt in, like, RSVP, or any other action.
8: Boost Your Best Posts
“People who like your page and their friends” or “People you choose through targeting.” You'll also be able to set your budget. You can chooseyour target audience and your budget.
9: Share Industry News and Hot Topics
Even your most loyal fans are interested in more than just your business. Sharing big news from your industry will show your fans that you’re not focused solely on promoting your business; you want to keep them informed about current topics. They’ll appreciate and respond to that.
Share news your fans will find interesting
10: Adjust Your Post Frequency
If your Facebook engagement is slipping, it might have something to do with your post frequency. Posting too little (say a few times a week) won’t help you establish relevance with Facebook’s algorithm and you’ll be fighting for space in your audience’s feed.
On the other hand, posting too often can hurt you, too. Facebook tries to show users the most interesting and relevant content from everyone they follow. If you’re posting a half-dozen times each day over a short period, expect a lot of your content to be missed.
11: Give People a Giggle
We all love a good laugh in our news feed. Lighten the mood for your fans and show them that you have some personality. Don’t overthink it; just do something to give your fans a chuckle. Keep their interests in mind and make sure the humor is relevant to your audience.
Even a touch of humor can spark engagement and shares.
12: Respond to Everyone
If you receive comments from your fans but fail to respond or acknowledge them, they’ll notice and stop engaging with you. It only takes a few minutes throughout the day to monitor your social activity and make a few quick or witty responses to fans who comment.
A little effort goes a long way toward making customers feel valued.
Consistent responses make fans feel valued and they’ll be more likely to engage with future posts from your page.
13: Solicit Fan Content
Encourage your fans to share photos on a given topic or photos of your products. This is a fun way to spark engagement and dialogue with fans. To go one step further, run a contest or offer a giveaway to encourage more shares and submissions.
Give fans a chance to be featured if they share their content.
Once engagement starts to climb, you’ll begin seeing even more image posts from fans.
14: Share Content From Other Channels
Unless you’re publishing the same posts to all of your social channels, you probably have a goldmine of content that users on other channels have never seen. Don’t let that content gather dust. Look over your content, videos, and images on other platforms (YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and so on) and share the best with your Facebook fans.
This is a great way to fill a few gaps in your weekly posting schedule if you come up short on content ideas.
15: Go Behind the Scenes With Live Video
Visual content is much more likely to be shared on Facebook, and this is especially true for video. Facebook Live makes it easy to stream live video to your audience, anytime you like, to leverage that engagement.
16: Make an Emotional Connection
If you want to elicit a big response from your fans, publish a post that appeals to your audience on an emotional level. Share content and tell stories that pull at people’s interests, emotions, fears, and even their dislikes. Brand loyalty doesn’t come from a product; it comes from a customer’s joy at experiencing a shared sentiment or finding a solution that works.
Share content that connects with fans on an emotional level.
Emotion drives loyalty and engagement.
17: Provide Value
Anytime you share or post content to your Facebook page, ask yourself what kind of value you’re providing to your fans. The best way to get their attention is to make sure there’s a takeaway or something in it for them. At the very least, give them a good chuckle. At best, teach people how to do something, inspire them to take action, and add value to their life.
Give away value to build trust and engagement with your fans.
18: Tap Into Trending Topics
There’s a whole world of content revolving around us every second. Keep your ear to the ground for events and trends that might grab the attention of your audience. Work a relevant trending hashtag into a post to help boost organic visibility in social search.
Get creative to find engagement opportunities in trends.
Both Facebook and Twitter make it easy to see which topics are trending based on posts and discussions. Google Trends provides the same insight into trending topics based on search volume and published topics.
If you’re a local business, keep up with city, county, and state event calendars and watch for local trends that could be used in the same fashion.
19: Recycle High-value Posts
You’re not limited to posting only new content to your Facebook page. Occasionally dip into your archives for an engagement spike.
Look at your Facebook posts from a previous year and identify posts that created a substantial amount of engagement. Post that content again, but tweak it so it’s fresh. Recycling posts allows you to spotlightpopular content that some of your fans may never have seen.
20: Upload Native Video
YouTube is a sizable social channel, but if you’ve been sharing your YouTube videos to your Facebook page, it’s time to make a switch. Facebook’s native video allows you to upload videos directly to your page, just like photos, and the algorithm works in your favor if you do.
Native video is proven to get more engagement and views.
If you compare YouTube shares to native videos on Facebook, native video receives more likes, shares, comments, and reach.
21: Celebrate Holidays
If you factor in silly holidays, along with more serious awareness dates and traditional holidays, you’ll never run out of ideas for your Facebook content schedule. If it’s a more whimsical celebration, have a little fun with it.
Use well-known events for engagement and promotion.
Your fans might also appreciate knowing when they can get a good deal, like $1 hotdogs on National Hot Dog Day at Sonic. Find ways to add value to every post to spark engagement.
22: Share Valuable Curated Content
Your audience knows when you’re promoting your business, and if you do it too much, they’ll start losing interest. To mix it up a bit, source high-value content relevant to their interests. Be a helpful resource for your fans.
Share valuable content from authoritative, trusted sources.
Use a tool like Quuu to curate content for specific audiences. It’s free and pulls relevant hand-curated content. Alltop and BuzzSumo are also recommended for finding popular content to share.
23: Post a Quiz or Poll
While a survey can generate more serious engagement, a quiz or poll can be a little more lighthearted. Focus on current developments in your industry or topics that are relevant to your audience. This type of interactive content can drive substantial engagement, especially if it generates personalized results that can easily be shared.
A free tool like Qzzr makes it easy to create customized, engaging quizzes that you can post anywhere, including Facebook.
Share quizzes on relevant topics on your Facebook page.
24: Rethink Hashtag Use
BuzzSumo analyzed over 1 billion Facebook posts and discovered that posts without hashtags get more engagement than posts with hashtags.
While you should use hashtags for trending topics to boost visibility, use hashtags sparingly (or not at all) in all of your other types of posts. Don’t make the mistake of using multiple hashtags in the hopes of increasing your content’s visibility.
25: Use Audience Targeting for Organic Posts
You can target a custom audience for your Facebook posts just like you target a specific audience with your ads.
Like ads, segmentation can potentially limit your reach, but the upside is your content is more likely to be seen by the people you want to get it in front of. It also costs nothing to set up a custom audience for your organic posts.
Put your posts in front of the perfect audience.
If this option isn’t enabled on your page, here’s how to turn it on. Go to your page and click the Settings tab. Under General Settings, you’ll find Audience Optimization for Posts. Click Edit and make sure this feature is turned on. This custom audience option will now be available whenever you post a status update to your page.
Turn on Audience Optimization for Posts.
26: Host Contests and Giveaways
Not many types of posts can garner as much attention as a giveaway or sweepstakes. The greater the value and relevance of the reward, the greater the engagement and potential reach. The best part about giveaways is they could potentially cost very little.
Give away your own product or even a decent third-party prize, and your costs are limited. You’re only paying out of pocket for the cost of the prize, fulfillment, and whatever service you use to host the promotion.
Everyone loves free stuff and contests bring people out of the woodwork.
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