10 Ways To Increase Facebook Engagement In 2021

With 2.5 million monthly users, Facebook is the number one social media platform. All the more reason for businesses to improve their reach on it. But recently it has started to get a lot of heat from brands because it’s become harder to increase engagement as a business profile compared to a regular user.

At the end of the year 2020, the average reach for an organic Facebook post was 5.2%, as opposed to 5.5 in the year 2019, which clearly shows a downward trend. But before you start to panic, let me tell you why that is.

Facebook is trying to make brands rethink how they get likes, comments, and shares. And for that, the engineers keep on tinkering with its algorithm. For example, Facebook creators are explicitly fighting against the use of spam tactics to engage more audiences, which is something that undercuts their algorithm.  This means what might have worked for your business some years ago will not do so anymore. You don’t need to worry though,  because in this article we are going to discuss some ways you can increase your Facebook engagement while remaining within the confines of the new algorithm.

Pay attention to the time-frame you post in

This advice might seem a bit old-school, nevertheless, posting when most of your followers are active will get you more likes, comments, and shares. And how do you determine that time-frame? For this purpose, data-driven times to post have been recorded by the page;  the point of this data is to determine what your posting schedule should look like for ensuring maximum engagement.

The key is to avoid posting at random and at a time when, if not all, most of your followers are online.

Make fan-centric content

Most brands confine themselves too much, trying to make content strictly about their business. And there is only so much that can be said about your service or product on a day-to-day basis before your audience tunes you out because of sheer boredom.

Remember, your Facebook profile doesn’t have to be all about your product or service. You can make content that is relatable to your audience while being relevant to your brand. Once you start creating content keeping this idea in mind, getting Facebook engagement becomes much easier.

Connect with your followers

Nobody in the history of social media ever liked being left on read after having sent a message. What makes you think you get away with that on your business profile? The interactions and the responses you give out have an impact on your post’s engagement. It can even increase it (or decrease it, depending on your strategy)  by encouraging further dialogue and discussion on your posts.

So don’t just sit there and be all happy about getting a few comments under your post. Get out there and build relationships with your fans through interactions.

Stop fishing for engagement

Avoid asking for engagement. Posts that beg for engagement, the kind that starts with  ‘comment below’, or ‘like this post’, might have worked some six years ago, but currently, these are frowned upon after Facebook got flooded with posts of this sort.

What’s the solution then? To make content that is so attention-grabbing that it’s bound to get engagement no matter what.

Make more visual content

And how do you do this? By taking your photography game up a notch. It’s a fact that visual content goes viral on social media, regardless of the platform it is on.

The majority of the content that is higher up on the news feed consists of photos. This means people engage more with the kind of information that is visually stimulating than that which includes nothing but text.

Keep your posts comprehensive

When every other tactic fails, try shortening your posts. It’s easy for users to scroll past posts that contain a wall of text because it could be that most of your followers are scrollers and mobile users and won’t pay much attention to actually reading a long post. So don’t treat your profile like a novel if you want to stop your audience right in their tracks. That is why you need to be brief.

What you can do to achieve that is by posting more in the following format which, by the way, is seen a lot on Facebook these days.

• Ask quick questions from followers.
• Post statistics from an article that requires a click for further information.
• Use witty quotations with a relevant and engaging photograph to grab attention.

Analyze your most popular content

Suppose one of your posts does a stellar job and gets a ton of likes, shares, and comments. Instead of taking this for granted, thinking it was just a coincidence, you should try to recreate the same social magic again.

Rather than playing the guessing game, it’s better to closely observe those posts that were a hit. After all, the key to understanding what to post highly depends on your audience’s reaction towards it.

Don’t be afraid of going live

Due to the Covid-19 lockdown, live videos on Facebook increased by 50%. It should be taken into account that live video receives six times more engagement than a regular video, that is why the Facebook algorithm endorses it so much. And whatever the algorithm likes, is met with a lot of reach.

It might take a bit of know-how for brands, but that is no reason to completely avoid it if you want your organic reach to increase. The pandemic doesn’t seem to be ending anytime soon either, so this is your chance to kill two birds with one stone.

Post more often

Can you get any engagement if you don’t post at all? No. In the same way, if you post more often, you receive more views hence your chances of engagement increase. Therefore, you need to post with consistency. But that does not mean you can post garbage and expect to get the needed endorsement. Because you don’t just want followers, you also want your audience to stick around.

Just remember to create attractive content, and schedule posts in a manner that allows you to be consistent.

More than like, aim for love

In recent times, Facebook has started to give more weightage to reaction buttons than to regular likes on posts. Strategize your posts to target emotional reactions such as sadness, anger, care, love, etc.

And if you are in the middle of figuring out what resonates with your audience, you can start with a social media sentiment analysis.

In the end, it all comes down to having a good Facebook engagement strategy, plain and simple.