Engagement on Facebook Pages has fallen by 70 percent since the start of 2017, according to BuzzSumo who analyzed over 880 million Facebook posts by brands and publishers.
As a social media marketer, it is worrying to see these trends.
But we feel there are ways we can combat this organic reach decline on Facebook and we’d love to share some strategies with you.
In this post, we’ll share 14 straightforward ways to increase your Facebook Page engagement — many of which are proven and have worked for us.
14 ways to increase your Facebook engagement
Starting a Facebook Page might be easy but with the falling organic reach and engagement, growing a Facebook Page can be challenging.
Here are the 14 tactics you can try today to increase your Facebook Page engagement:
Let’s dive in!
1. Post less
But the main reason for the growth wasn’t just because we were posting less. It’s because posting less allowed us to…
focus on quality instead of quantity.
We were able to share the best content every day when we post only once or twice a day. When we were posting four to five times a day, we struggled to consistently find so much great content to share.
If you are a solo social media manager or a small business owner who handles your own social media, you might have experienced this before. Finding great content takes time, and you don’t always have the time to do that.
That said, if you are able to maintain the quality of your content while posting many times a day, don’t feel that you have to change your strategy. A few of our readers post more than 10 times a day to their Facebook Page and have found great success.
2. Post when your fans are online
We used to believe that there’s a universal best time to post on Facebook: early afternoon.
But not anymore.
We now believe that every brand has its own perfect time(s) to post. That’s because the best time to post depends on several factors that are specific to each brand: What industry are you in? Where is your audience based? When do your followers use Facebook?
A scientific way to find your best time to post is to look at your own data.
In your Facebook Page Insights, under the Post tab, you get data about when your Facebook Page fans are online for each day of the week.
Using your data, you can make educated guesses of your best posting time. I would recommend experimenting with times during both the peak and non-peak hours to see which works better for your brand.
3. Create specifically for Facebook
What works on Instagram or Twitter might not always work on Facebook. For example, hashtags are great on Instagram and GIFs are great on Twitter but both less so on Facebook.
It’s best to create your Facebook posts specifically for your Facebook Page.
With Buffer, you can easily customize your social media post for each platform when sharing to multiple platforms at once. You can even go one step further by customizing your article headline for your Facebook post.
If you would like to give this a go, we would love for you to try Buffer for Business and experience the difference.
4. Try videos
If you’re wondering how to craft your Facebook posts, we think you should try videos.
From what we have seen this year, videos perform best on Facebook in terms of reach and engagement.
The BuzzSumo study mentioned above also found that “videos now gain twice the level of engagement of other post formats on average”.
Here are three more tips to help you get the most out of your videos:
- Upload your videos onto Facebook: Videos uploaded onto Facebook have, on average, 110 percent higher engagement rate and 478 percent higher share rate than YouTube links, according to a quintly study of six million Facebook posts.
- Experiment with square videos: After running $1,500 worth of experiments, we found that our square videos received higher average views, engagement, and completion rate than our landscape videos, especially on mobile devices.
- Add captions: When studying over 500 Facebook Pages and 12,000 Facebook videos, Locowise found that 93 percent of video views happened without sound.
5. Go live
Facebook has also been pushing their Live videos a lot in this past year.
They tweaked their algorithm to rank live videos higher when they are live than when they are no longer live. Facebook reported that “People spend more than 3x more time watching a Facebook Live video on average compared to a video that’s no longer live” and “people comment more than 10 times more on Facebook Live videos than on regular videos”.
For our #impactofsocial celebration, we hosted five Facebook Live sessions, which received about 4,000 views and 30 comments on average.
Here’s a bonus: Your followers might be more likely to check out your content.
Social Media Examiner noticed that when they went live more often, their non-live content received more exposure. Their founder and CEO, Michael Stelzner, believes that when they go live, their fans are exposed to their brand even if they don’t watch the live video. That might have subtly encouraged them to check out Social Media Examiner’s Facebook Page.
To help you get started with Facebook Live videos, here are some ideas you can try:
- Share behind-the-scenes of an event, your work processes, or your office
- Host a Question-and-Answer or Ask-Me-Anything session
- Explain or demonstrate how to do something
- Discuss breaking news
- Share weekly tips
6. Share curated content
It might feel weird sharing other brands’ content. That’s how we felt initially. But after experimenting with sharing high-quality curated content, the results changed…
