Facebook now makes up a significant piece of the social media marketing puzzle since it has become a social platform where businesses can organically reach their target audience fairly quickly (without using paid ads).
However, since the engagement a post receives now determines whether or not it will appear in a person’s newsfeed, businesses need to find ways to boost their posts’ engagement levels. Facebook tracks posts that receive a high number of comments, shares and likes and shares them with users who are likely to be interested in that content.
The problem this poses for businesses is that it is harder to get those likes, comments and shares when posts are not being seen by a large portion of their target audience. Businesses need engagement to show up in their followers’ newsfeeds, but they need to show up in their newsfeeds to get the engagement.
Luckily, there are ways businesses can reach their audience and boost their Facebook engagement, despite the new newsfeed changes. Here are five tactics businesses should try to start getting more likes, comments, clicks and shares on their Facebook posts.
Post at the right time: As more people join Facebook, the more posts there are for businesses to compete with. The trick is to post when engagement is the highest, not necessarily when the most users are logged in. And although most people check their Facebook during the day, most engagement happens at night between 10 p.m. and midnight. At night time, fewer posts are published so users have more time to go through and engage with each post.
Share content followers want to see, not what you want them to see: If businesses want people to engage with their Facebook posts, they need to share content people want to see. Often, businesses assume just because they’re in a certain industry, all of the content has to be directly related to that field. The problem is that most users don’t want to read about the same thing every day. To balance it out, businesses should broaden the type of content they share.
Reply to people: Don’t just publish a post and move on. Businesses should check their comments throughout the day so that they can reply as quickly as possible. The majority of people who leave comments for your posts do so because they resonated with what was published. Businesses that make these users feel heard and appreciated are likely to see the same engagement for their future posts as well.
Shorten your posts: People don’t visit Facebook to read long form content so businesses need to make sure their posts are short and sweet. Facebook posts that are between 0-50 characters long receive the most engagement. The more characters a business adds after that, the less engagement they can expect.
Create blog posts specifically for Facebook: Since links have more reach on Facebook, businesses should start creating content on their blog specifically for Facebook and share this on Facebook. Businesses should begin by searching for keywords they would like to write about or look at content about topics that are highly shared on Facebook.
