Boosting Engagement For Your Business Facebook Page

One of the biggest issues facing business owners who operate a Facebook page for their company is Facebook's strict throttling of organic reach (especially if you try to post anything even remotely professional).

At Ace Digital Marketing, we manage a number of Facebook pages both for clients and for our own interests. Understanding and increasing reach is something we are always striving to learn more about.

One of our own Facebook pages has a rapidly growing audience of 26,500 fans. The posts made on this page consistently reach over 100,000 people per week. But nonetheless, it has a nasty problem with engagement on promotional content. 

For example, a standard non-promotional post - especially one that is focused around humour or personal interest - will pick up anywhere from 1.5-2.5k likes on, and at least several hundred shares and comments, within 24 hours of posting. As you would expect, this amount is slowly growing as more people like the page in question.

However, if a post is added that links to a promotional page, such as a link to buy a product, then the reach is significantly throttled. It might only reach 10% of the audience that a normal, non-promotional post would ... at least without paying for ads.

And this experience is similar to that of many other business owners and Internet marketers, looking to make a splash on Facebook.

Basically, Facebook wants you to pay to get your offer in front of your fans and audience. 

So what tips can you, the humble business owner, use to increase engagement for your Facebook page? Without having to spend more money on Facebook ads.

1. Post frequently. We believe that most businesses should be trying to post once per day on Facebook. Whether it's a daily special update, or a link to a news article featuring your business, or a photo of some cool new office artwork, regular posts will help in getting your engagement up and attracting a new audience. The easiest way to do this is generally through scheduling content. 20 minutes spent on a Sunday night could easily yield you a week's worth a scheduled content. Ace Digital Marketing recommends a nifty program called FPTraffic if you'd like to schedule your own posts. 
2. Minimize overt promotion. Look at other strategies to funnel customers from Facebook onto your offer page. This is especially important if you're trying to promote products but don't have much in the way of budget for advertising on Facebook. For example, let's say you run a business selling ethically-sourced clothing. Instead of posting a hard sell promotional image of your clothing that links back to your eCommerce store, consider posting a link to a blog post or article that explains what makes your brand's clothing unique. 
3. Use video where possible. Videos seem to attract better engagement from Facebook's audience. Most smartphones take perfectly acceptable quality video for everyday use ... so think of some interesting ways to use video to boost up your business. Videos also tend to get great results when being boosted via Facebook ads. Just remember to ensure that your video makes sense with no audio (most Facebook users keep videos muted).
4. Make the most of human-centric posts. It's called Facebook for a reason. Faces - the most important aspect of human interaction - tend to elicit higher engagement. Anything that is about people doing interesting things will generally perform better than a heavily promotional text-based image. For example, if you run a retail store and currently have a promotion, then a photo of a shop assistant interacting with a customer (with promotional content in the post text area) will probably perform better than a graphics-based image that says "Sale On Now". Why? Because of the human element. 
5. Ask for engagement (but be careful). Facebook are a bit iffy about this, but it does work in some circumstances. Asking your existing audience to like, comment, or share actually goes against what Facebook deem to be best practice. However, it can also be very effective at boosting up engagement on some content. Not every post should have accompanying text that says "how many likes for X" or "like, comment & share". But occasionally using a cleverly-worded statement like "Who here loves product A?" or "tag a friend who needs this in their home" can help boost up engagement. 

If you want to make the most of social media for your business, then Ace Digital Marketing can help. Contact us today for a review of your social strategy and promotion techniques - and let us put together a social media plan that will bring new leads and customers through your door. 

​By Sam Frost