Facebook launched in 2004 and now has 2.5 billion monthly active users and over 90 million Facebook business pages. Users and pages have grown, but engagement on Facebook business pages has been declining for years.
On Facebook, “engagement” includes comments, shares, likes, and other reactions. According to the 2019 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report, Facebook engagement decreased across all industries from 0.16 percent in 2018 to 0.09 percent in 2019.
A change in Facebook’s algorithm in 2018 began prioritizing content from friends and family and “demoting” brand-related content. People are less likely to see your content if you have a Facebook business page, and they can’t engage with content they don’t see.
Increasing user engagement is one way to increase Facebook post visibility. Posts with more engagement are more likely to appear in the Facebook newsfeed, increasing engagement and visibility. Seeing engagements on a post also encourages others to comment or react.
Try these strategies to increase engagement on your Facebook business page.
1. Get to know your audience
The best way to get people to interact with your Facebook posts is to know who they are, their demographics, their interests, when they are online, and what other sites they visit. The better you know your audience, the easier it will be to write for them.
2. Create great content that gets noticed
In order for your followers to engage with your content rather than just skim it and move on, your posts must make them feel something. Aim for posts that make readers smile, think, laugh, or cry—posts that evoke an emotional response.
3. Post at the right times
There is no “best” day or time to post on Facebook. A Buffer study found that posts made between 1-3 p.m. on Thursdays and Fridays get 18% more engagement than posts made on other days. Sunday is the best day for engagement, according to Buzzsumo, and posts between 9-11 p.m. are the most popular. Rather than posting at random times, track engagement over a few months and use Facebook Insights to find the most effective posting times for your company.
4. Review your most read posts
When one of your posts gets a lot of engagement, look closely at what made it work. Was it an image, GIF, or video? How old is it? Was there anything in particular that drew readers in? Was it funny, sad, or informative? Collect as much data as you can about successful posts and use it to test what works best to replicate it.
5. Making Facebook content mobile-friendly
Statistica estimates that by January 2020, 79% of Facebook users will only use a smartphone. With so many potential customers visiting your page via mobile, you need to make sure your posts are engaging and short.
6. Experiment with video
Video dominates Facebook engagement. BuzzSumo found that videos get 73% more engagement than photos on Facebook pages. Some videos are better than others. Facebook’s algorithm favors “native” videos rather than links to YouTube or a company website, and live videos get six times as many interactions and ten times as many comments as prerecorded videos.
7. Ask questions
According to BuzzSumo, questions get more engagement on Facebook than any other type of post except video. Post a thought-provoking or fill-in-the-blank question related to your brand and ask your followers to respond.
8. Make use of hashtag
Using one or two key hashtags strategically can help you increase engagement on your Facebook business page. Adding a trending hashtag to a relevant post can help it appear in hashtag searches and encourage readers to interact with it.