6 ways to engage your audience for your brand Facebook page
From Facebook’s inception it was designed to keep people connected with their friends. That was its primary purpose. And It worked well.
But Facebook grew, there was far too much potential for this site for it not to evolve. Hence the addition of Facebook pages for brands. But many brand page admins make the mistake of assuming Facebook users are “friends” who will look at company posts simply because the company posts them.
Alas, this is not true and this is because not all posts are created equal. Think of it this way, your business is not automatically friends with your audience. You have to engage with your publics. Engagement in Facebook at the moment is reflected by three different actions: Likes, Shares and Comments. Here are six ways to create engagement via posts for your brand.
As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. On Facebook, a picture could be worth a thousand likes. This is simply because a picture is the easiest way to catch a user’s attention. It is more visually appealing than the average post, when you scroll through your news feed, isn’t it the large, coloured images that get you to stop?
In reference to brands, a familiar image is KEY. Familiarity in an image is as simple as including your company logo or a face that’s tied to your brand. If you include a shorted link for users to click on, this can be particularly useful in terms of engagement.
Fill-in-the-blank posts are great at creating engagement. The blanks are essentially platforms for people to share their creativity. These types of posts often bring fun and short quips or comments, which then encourage the other members of your audience to react and interact.
Fancy Feast — a gourmet cat food brand — regularly creates these posts. The post in the image above received more than 170 likes, 407 comments, and twelve shares. Notice how the comments outnumber the likes.
Photo captions bring these two together so your publics can really interact on your page. All you have to do is post a photo and ask fans come up with the wittiest caption.
The above is an example from National Geographic’s Facebook Page. They asked their audience to create a caption for this photo of a baby orangutan. It received more than 27,800 likes, 11,700 shares and 3,700 comments.
A lot of page admins make the mistake of updating their wall without putting much thought into adding a description or ending the description with a question. Asking questions is one of the easiest methods to prompt fans to comment and share their thoughts. Without asking a question of people, they may just read the article and move on despite them feeling they have opinions that they would like to share.
Inc. Magazine posted an article with a question as its headline. In this case, the question requires that you give your feedback in the form of a personal story.
You can also ask simple questions. Questions that require the audience to make a choice – which would you prefer? Left or Right? – are able to amass comments because it requires less brain engagement. People will comments because its simplicity means they won’t waste time or effort writing the comment.
Here is an example from Ideeli, a web retailer that specializes in flash sales.
Tips are ideas that users are able to consume and implement easily. A tip is engaging because it gives value to your audience and therefore makes them more likely to react.
Here is an example from Mari Smith, a Facebook expert who shares great ideas and tips that add value to her community. Her tips are structured to help her community and are often written in a step-by-step process.
Quotes are one of the easiest and still most popular ways to get likes and shares on Facebook. They usually get more shares and likes compared to comments because quotes are often inspirational which means that users can relate to them, this makes them more personal in nature.
Here’s a great example from from Carolʼs Daughter, which received more than 7,910 shares and 22,141
likes. Inspired yet?
Do you engage with your audience using these methods? Are there any more we could add to the list?
