2020 has ushered in a number of trends in social media technologies and channels that marketers are eyeing to leverage. But, despite a growing number of new alternatives now offering opportunities for commercialization (lookin’ at you, TikTok), the original social advertising behemoth - Facebook - shouldn’t be ignored.

Enhancing Engagement

Today, Facebook has over 2 billion global users of all ages and thousands of businesses vying for their attention. With so much competition and a finicky algorithm, it can be challenging to try to build and engage your audience. From the basics of business page setup to the nitty-gritty of the insights on the back end, let’s take a look at a few techniques you can practice to increase your Facebook engagement.

Optimize Your Business Page

A Facebook business page that was built a while ago might have a lot of missing pieces. Whether you’ve just been handed access to the account, or are building a page from scratch, it’s important to complete and optimize it. After all, you want to serve and attract visitors who are interested in your products and services.

Before anything else, ensure that this simple checklist is complete:

• Use your Business Logo as your profile picture.

• Include a cover image that makes an impact. Facebook also gives you the option to add a cover video that tells your brand story within 90 seconds, giving you the opportunity to excite your audience’s curiosity. 

• Make contact information easily visible to your audience so that they know how to reach you via email, phone calls or on your website. 

• Integrate Apps such as those of other social media channels that you have a presence on, to increase the number of people who view your social profile. Facebook also emphasizes the fact that having a presence across different platforms significantly helps increase your visibility. 

• Add your business location so that visitors understand the geographic scope of your operations. 

• Include a description of your business that clearly informs the visitor of what your offering is why, your business is important e.g,. brand personality, differentiators and what you stand for. 

• Clearly define the categories within which your business operates. Specifically choosing the category your business belongs to is far more efficient than describing it as just a ‘local business,” because it makes you appear in Facebook search results and also helps Facebook recommend your page to people who have previously expressed interest in similar businesses or product offerings. 

• Update business hours for your audience to know when you are available and when they can reach you. 

• Encourage recommendations and respond to them. This is a great way to engage with your audience and show them that you are a responsive proactive company that cares about your customers.

While most of these checklist items can be completed fairly quickly, you will be surprised at just how quickly these improvements will impact the visibility of your business page. 

Time Your Posts Just Right

Timing is everything. Be sure you’re leveraging Facebook’s Audience Insights, which note the time periods where your posts receive the highest reach and engagement. Post immediately before these peak intervals to get in front of people when they’re checking in.

If your page is new and has no data to base a decision off of, Sprout Social, a social media platform manager, revealed that Wednesday was the best day to post on Facebook, and content shared between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. enjoyed the highest level of engagement. Use this information to help guide your testing moving forward!

Invite to Like

Inviting friends to “like” your business page on Facebook is a common technique used for attracting and building a following - but that's not where the invitations stop. You can also invite accounts that like posts on your page or like your ad campaigns. Let's say you have a lead generation ad running, and the campaign has gained a large number of leads and likes. These "likers" have an interest in your content. To help them discover your brand more fully, invite them to your page. While this approach requires more effort, the chances of your posts showing up in visitors’ news feeds are much higher if they like your page; ergo, so too are the chances of this audience engaging with your content. 

Employ Storytelling

In the age of content marketing, a fundamental step is to really understand your customers and tell them a story. Mapping out customer journeys and defining user personas can reveal content that your target audience likes, what interests them and what their problems are. 

Once you have a clear profile, create content that speaks the language of your audience. Users are much more likely to engage with your content if you tell a story that is meaningful and relevant to their lives. With an incredible number of digital channels, tools and techniques that can help you tell stories in interesting ways, the format of your digital storytelling is variable and depends on audience preferences.

Deliver Accessible Content in Desired Formats

When coming up with content that engages your Facebook audience, it’s important to think about all of the different ways your followers are consuming it. Keep in mind which formatting they prefer - image, video, text, etc. - and make sure that you also offer accessible versions of that content to ensure followers with disabilities can also enjoy it.

Over the years, the importance of videos for increasing engagement has steadily risen and 2020 will see a continued rise. In fact, wyzowl, a leading explainer video company, noted that 83% of video marketers say video has helped them generate leads. Thankfully, you don’t need to spend a fortune on equipment to make quality video content; devices that you use every day, such as your iPhone, are equipped with great cameras that are useful for creating clear and high-definition videos. Other affordable equipment includes the GoPro, a Kimbal stabilizer and a phone tripod, along with an external microphone. 

These tools, along with apps like Tele.Prompter+, which allows you to upload text and record videos using a teleprompter device, are great for diversifying your existing content strategy. Interestingly, Locowise, an analytics and social reporting tool company, studied over 500 Facebook Pages and 12,000 Facebook videos and found that 93% of videos are viewed without sound. That’s why adding captions to your Facebook videos is a must! 

Use Emojis 👍

An astonishing and simple way to boost your engagement rate is by adding emojis to your content. According to Hubspot, adding emojis to your posts can increase your likes by 57% and comments and shares by 33%. Using emojis can help personify your brand and give it a human touch that people can relate to - and this goes for all audiences and age groups.

Curate Content

Did you know that 88 percent of consumers trust users’ reviews as much as they do personal recommendations? Social proof is an increasingly important element of Facebook marketing lately; while consumers don’t always trust what a brand says directly, they’re quite likely to trust a peer who recommends your product or service. Use the great things your customers are already saying about your business and turn their feedback into clever content that piques others’ interest!

There’s an enormous amount of other content being uploaded by media companies and everyday people all day, every day. Curate and share content that’s relevant to your business and your customers to serve as a resource - without needing to create anything from scratch. This helps shareability and increases your visibility, especially if other businesses and blogs mention that you shared their content. 

Different types of curated content that your users might be interested in are: 

• Inspiring or heartwarming stories by other people

• News articles

• Guides and other helpful content

What’s most important about content curation is that it remains relevant to your audience.

Facebook Groups

Since 2019, Facebook has been seriously pushing its community-oriented groups as a way to bring people with similar interests together on the platform. Groups continue to be a fantastic way to not only foster community, but also demonstrate your relevance as a business.

Other than the conventional ways of building your Facebook engagement through content on your business bag, look for groups that are relevant to your business. You can join a Facebook group using your business page and interact with users who are fans of products or services that are similar to yours, and even create new groups directly through your business page.

Sharing your content with the members of a group and interacting with them can help you showcase your products and brand personality, and also helps respond to any concerns that they might raise, even if it is not directly related to your business. This method showcases your authority in your domain and has the potential to intrigue group members to check out your page and your content. 

Integrate Chatbots

When people are online 24/7, your business technically is, too. Even if you can’t respond to messages all day, every day, current and potential customers are still likely expecting a response from you. That’s where chatbots come in.

Chatbots can serve as intuitive, artificial assistants - and are extremely useful for enhancing customer experience on Facebook. With the help of simple tools like Chatfuel, which even beginners and non-developers can use, you can build a chatbot that helps reduce the gap between you and your target audience. Automated customer service has become easier to incorporate into your Facebook business page, giving rise to the possibility for you to interact with users and address customers’ questions and concerns. 

Facebook Ads and Engagement

Effective Facebook ads help you to get high volumes of qualified people interested in your business, who will eventually visit your social pages to view your compelling content. Since you’ve targeted your audience correctly, these visitors will engage with your posts, which is fuel for the algorithm to tell Facebook to start sharing more of your posts with them.

In the end, the more of the right people you get your content in front of, the more they’ll go back to learn about your business (on social or even through Google), and the more you’ll convince each platform how relevant and engaging your business is over your competitors. This will lead to an increase in reach, then an increase is awareness and engagement, and should ultimately inspire more visitors to buy from you!

Think of Facebook Ads as a jolt of caffeine for your organic social media efforts; they don’t replace all of the other efforts you work hard at to keep your business running, but they’ll offer a dose of fuel that can charge it with energy.

Target With Razor-Sharp Focus, and Test

Facebook’s Business Manager allows you to precisely target the people that matter to your brand, thus allowing you to reach out with offers to people more likely to respond. At the core of every decision you make on behalf of your brand should be your target audience, and this is especially important when it comes to your advertising efforts.

Think about who your customer is, and use Facebook’s audience targeting to test different audiences that align with your different customer personas. Advertisements or even boosting posts that are already performing well can help encourage users to interact with you and/or take other actions. A strong focus on engagement can help you boost your conversion rates, as well as increase brand loyalty. 

Think Like Your Consumer

You can never really underestimate the importance of having a deep understanding of your customers before diving into engagement efforts. If you don’t know who you’re trying to reach, it will be extremely difficult to create, share and promote content that resonates with them. Start by learning who your customers are - and think like them as your make your business decisions.

With a little effort to really involve your users in your business’ online activities, you are sure to have a stellar Facebook marketing strategy this year!