How to grow your Facebook engagement

If you read our recent post on changes to the Facebook News Feed algorithm, you’ll know that the platform has taken steps to push business content further down the News Feed display. This means less of your social media audience will see your posts – unless Facebook judges it to be worthy, via the amount of comments, reactions and interactions you generate.

As an entrepreneur or new business owner, you’ll also know the value of using social media marketing to drive awareness and traffic of your new business opportunity, so how do you balance these two seemingly conflicting actions? The answer is in growing your Facebook engagement.

If you create posts which resonate with fans, get Facebook users liking, commenting and sharing, you’ll find your new app business off to a flying start. Here are a few ways to grow your Facebook engagement and send the right signals to the platform to boost your News Feed ranking.

Use Facebook Live: Some types of content naturally generate more engagement than others and Live video is one of those. If you’re struggling to generate lots of engagement on posts, try switching up your content format to include regular Live streams.

Experiment with post times : Facebook, and tools such as Hootsuite, allow you to schedule posts ahead of time. If you always hit send at the same time, you may not be hitting the sweet spot for post engagement. Hootsuite has an optimum time feature which will auto schedule posts for the best engagement or, if you update manually, swap the times of your regular posts. Study the impact and make note of when more engagement is actually flowing in. The Insights tab on your Facebook Business page will help you see when your audience is online so you can experiment accordingly.

Use curated content : If you read an interesting article and find it to be funny, relevant or interesting, chances are others will too. Reshare these posts on your Facebook page. This is called curated content and is a great way to boost engagement by sharing already great performing content with your own audience.

Boost your posts : Facebook allows you to pay to ‘boost’ posts for a certain period of time. While this does mean you need to put some budget to it, you control the amount you want to spend. Because it’s a paid promotion it’s guaranteed to show to more people.

Run a competition : Competitions naturally get people liking, sharing and commenting so run a competition regularly and you could well improve Facebook’s perception of your page by racking up a good influx of user engagement.