Facebook remains the king of all social media this year with around 1,871 million active users. Hence, Facebook still remains one of the most relevant places to build your social media presence.
For this reason, aiming for as high interaction as possible on your Facebook page is a really good way to get your business in the mind of the customers. With so many different businesses and so many Facebook pages available though, how do you get more attention for yours without paying to boost a post?
The first thing you need to know is that Facebook makes analytics of your page’s performance available to you in a very convenient way. To access these analytics, go to your page and click on the Posts tab. Underneath the page’s banner, click on the more options icon and select view insights in the drop-down menu that appears. Under page insights, look at your posts for the last three months and study the reach and engagement of each post to see if the numbers are low, or are decreasing. These values can be used to assess how relevant your posts are. To make the analysis easier, download your data into a spreadsheet-like excel and look at the page both before and after certain posts to see which ones are getting more engagement and which ones are getting less.
The average post has a relevance of about 72 hours. However, there are certain posts that users find relevant longer than the usual lifespan and engage with for a longer time. These posts are known as “evergreen posts”. In order to build up more engagement for your page, there should be a fair quantity of evergreen posts so that some of your posts continue to be shared continuously. Evergreen posts are not news articles, statistics, seasonal or holiday-specific information, or a post about the latest trends. Rather, they cover common and easily relatable concepts like weight loss, love and romance, jokes, and food among others.
Getting higher engagement is not about posting more content but it’s about posting what is considered quality content. This notwithstanding, it is still advisable to post more than once in a day but finding the right mix for your business will require you to play around with it a little and find the right fit. With regards to quality, however, aim to make posts that display your unique personality and use a mixture of text, pictures, videos, and links. Facebook engagement stats show that image posts get 179% more interactions and that video posts are the most shared type of post getting an average of 89.5 average Facebook shares. In addition, try to ask a question because content ending with questions also get 162% more interactions.
Know your target audience for a post. Create a post in such a way that it is relevant to the audience of Facebook users you would like to target specifically. In addition, use Facebook’s organic post targeting to deliver the content to the audience you feel will be the most likely to engage with the post. Facebook allows you to target audiences based on 8 criteria: gender, relationship status, education level, age, location, language, interests and post end date.
Most importantly, pay attention to the time you put up a post. Only 300 of 1500 possible posts show up in a person’s news feed. So your chances of getting noticed are higher when fewer people are also putting up posts at the same time. Posting prior to peak times for engagement give your post a head start. Interestingly, overall engagement seems to be highest on Sunday.
Use these tips to adjust your strategy for posting Facebook content and the engagement of your posts should increase. It is important to note, however, that each page and its audience are different. These tips must be taken and personalized to fit your audience and your page’s unique voice. Experiment with posts and methods to get the optimum engagement for your Facebook page.