What is Facebook engagement?

Before looking at Facebook engagement, we need to clear that up. Perhaps you already know what we mean when we say “engagement”, but it doesn’t hurt to refresh your memory. Engagement is a social media analytics metric that measures user activities on your posts. If your content isn’t stopping your audience from mindlessly scrolling through their feed, then you’re not posting engaging content. You can measure engagement on different social media profiles, for example, on Facebook, or Instagram.

Well, Facebook engagement isn’t just another vanity metric, you’ll know more about how loyal your fans are and what your fans are interested in. If you post content that is bland and you don’t try to interact with your audience, they can’t establish any kind of relationship with you.

It’s possible to engage your fans by asking them to talk about their experiences with your brand, to share your video, or to tag their friends under the post. You can take it to the next level if you incentivize their interactions, just make sure it’s legal.

You might ask yourself, “so what if they’re passively viewing it and not interacting? Why care?” We have answers to those questions, all thoroughly described so you get the bigger picture.

Why Facebook Engagement Is Important

So what are the advantages of increasing your Facebook engagement? Here are the top four examples:

• Social Proof: All of those likes, comments, and shares are not only numbers. They also provide your audience with social proof of your brand and make you look more trustworthy. Specifically, when the brand offers incentives and uploads entertaining content, customers’ brand loyalty increases. Take note of that.
• Marketing Reach: Higher engagement rates mean more social media reach which, in turn, means more marketing reach. Facebook algorithm favors posts that are getting more attention, therefore posts that tend to do well get more exposure so more people will see it. As engagement increases, so does the potential for your post to achieve higher viral reach. The more people see your content, the more chances you have to promote your product to them and get a lead. When users see something that they appreciate, they want to share it with their friends by tagging them in the comments or sharing it directly through Messenger. Reach and engagement metrics are both important, so remember to follow up with them regularly.
• Cost-Effectiveness: Compared to other types of marketing like traditional advertising, social media marketing is way more cost-effective. Typically, ad budgets were spent on billboards and made-for-TV ads that may not be relevant to those watching. Instead, social media sites such as Facebook allow for targeted ads that allow you to show your ads to a select and interested group of people. This can save you a lot of money and be the best solution for those with a smaller budget.
• Brand Awareness: Lastly, higher levels of engagement mean more brand awareness. This is crucial for building your reputation when you are starting out or maintaining a positive image when you are already established.

Ways to Increase Facebook Engagement

Now that you know what Facebook Engagement exactly is, and you realize the importance of it, check these few ways to increase it:

• Get to Know Your Audience: Make sure to use the information you collected to make your customer personas. Knowing your audience is crucial to creating emotional connections with the help of personalized posts. All of the content you produce will have to be relevant and valuable to your audience in order for them to start engaging with it more. Sotrender conducted a case study that showed exactly why it’s beneficial to find out more about your target audience when their interests and needs are so specific. They wanted to create effective marketing campaigns that would reach current and potential clients. By examining Sotrender and Facebook Insights data, they learned more about their audience’s psychographics and who has the potential to influence them. 

Photo by Bewakoof.com Official

• Perfect Your Content: Along with your content always being relevant and always having value for your followers, it must also correspond to certain standards you establish for yourself. Always strive to perfect your posts and improve the quality of your content, whether it is written, visual, or audio-focused. One way of doing that is by comparing your top-performing posts in the Sotrender app. You’ll know what your fans interact with and what catches their attention. AI-powered audio to text transcription tool like Audext can also help to boost the value of the content and make it easily searchable.
• Use All Kinds of Content: To make sure your content strategy isn’t getting stale, try to make your posts more diverse. This means using everything from text to images to videos. Use GIFs and infographics. Try to create flash games or quizzes. Go live regularly to socialize. But most importantly, keep all of these on a very high-quality level and never choose quantity over quality. Remember about the most important and engaging posts such as quizzes, contests, and giveaways – they work well for your fans’ engagement. 
• Be Consistent: This not only means posting consistently high-quality content but also posting it regularly. Make sure to create a schedule and plan when you will be posting and what kinds of content will it be. You can use the heatmap by Sotrender to find out when your audience is active to know when you should be posting. Have a live stream every Friday or on the weekends and host monthly contests or giveaways. Be sure to also set the hours when you will be posting as these will also influence the amount of engagement you receive.

Sotrender’s Heatmap displaying Interactivity Index

• Inspire, Teach, Inform, Entertain: Every marketing blog such as 3 To 5 Marketing will tell you one and the same thing which is that your content must have a purpose. There are four main types of purposes that your content may have including inspiring, teaching, informing, or entertaining your audience. What you choose will depend on what your brand is about, what kind of content is more suitable for your social media, what tone would you like to maintain, what goals you are pursuing, and what message you want to be sent to your followers.
• Ask & Answer Questions: The key to improving Facebook engagement is to interact with your audience. Don’t just sit there and wait. Instead, ask questions and answer the questions of your audience. Make them what to give their opinion to you and provide them with your own opinion too. This has to be a two-way relationship where both sides are actively participating in the process.

• Improve Your Skills: The best way to ensure that you are doing great with your social media marketing strategy is to improve your skills. Read such articles as 9 social media certifications and classes to advance your career and choose the courses that suit you best. You may think that you know everything, but there is actually always space for growth. There is no limit to your knowledge, so just like you teach your audience, you must always continue teaching yourself.
• Be Cautious: The Internet is a scary place. Everything you say will forever stay online (sometimes even after you supposedly deleted it). Consequently, you must always be careful about what you say or do. Read about the things to remember while creating sensitive social media content, for example. Keep in mind that even the tiniest detail can influence your brand’s reputation a lot, and this is something that is mostly irreparable.
• Proofread Everything: Last but not least, make sure to test everything. It’s nice to experiment and take risks, but sometimes checking everything several times can be better in certain situations. Always proofread your posts in order to avoid unwanted punctuation, spelling, or grammar errors as well as typos. If you are scripting a video, ask someone to read the outline so that you don’t have to reshoot it again afterward. It’s better to have a backup plan and spend some time on it rather than go into battle absolutely blind.

How can I measure user engagement metrics?

Now that you know why it matters, we can give you some examples of how you can measure it. As we said before, using a tool like Sotrender allows you to learn about your Facebook engagement in different ways. For example, you can find out how your audience is responding to your images, videos, and links differently. Are they sharing GIFs, tagging their friends, or sharing your content? The information is only a few clicks away.

User activities by day

You can look at graphs such as this one to see how your fans’ activity has changed over a specific time-frame. Keeping track of the increase and decrease in types of activities for specific days can let you know whether your content strategy is doing well.

You can also measure engagement using Sotrender’s Interactivity Index (InI). It’s a unique metric that discerns types of user activities by assigning weights to them. Relative Activity Index takes into consideration that some profiles are just more popular than others, so you can compare activity relative to page size.

Interactivity Index, Sotrender

If you’re curious about the posts that did especially well, you can check the Content tab and pick Top posts. You can see how every individual post performed on engagement metrics and more. The engagement metrics here include the number of shares, comments, and reactions, as well as the InI score. It’s a convenient way to confirm any ideas you might have about your content performance.

Engagement made easy

Now that you know what is Facebook engagement and how to analyze your engagement on Facebook, you can do something about it.

Sotrender doesn’t only take care of your analytics needs. You can moderate your Facebook content using Social Inbox in Sotrender. If you have people moderating your page directly from Facebook, it might be difficult to keep up with who answered which comment or message. By using Sotrender’s Social Inbox, you can engage your fans while staying organized. You will still be able to respond to them using emojis and preview their posts the same way you would on Facebook.

Social Inbox in Sotrender

You can find out more about Social Inbox in Sotrender in this blog post.

Final Thoughts

Increasing your Facebook engagement and social media engagement specifically is not that difficult once you understand what engagement is and know different tricks to help you. If you think you’ve missed anything, read this article again and take notes in case you need some inspiration. Try to think of some ways that your brand could engage more with your audience, and test it out. Remember to check those engagement metrics so you can keep making data-driven decisions about your strategy.