10 May 2019
Social Media Engagement on Facebook: Seek Social’s Advanced Techniques
The Seek Social blog returns to what we know best this week – digital marketing. And in particular, we return to our series on how to improve your social media engagement on Facebook. Today we present you with five advanced Facebook techniques designed to make your engagement rate soar! Before we get to that though, if you haven’t already you might want to check out the other blogs in The Seek Social team’s ‘Engagement on Facebook’ series here and here. Already up to speed? Here we go then…
Engage with other brands…
Seek Social have mentioned this before, but it’s an approach that’s often forgotten since you don’t deal solely with customers in this case… Nevertheless, engaging with other brands can be a great way to generate social media engagement, particularly engagement on Facebook. We’d class this as an advanced Facebook technique though because you need to be tactful. You need to find a way that pays respect to the brand whose page you posted on, while also pointing out the benefits your product can have for potential customers. And of course, don’t spam the page or outright try and poach their customers, that’s a big no-no…
Boost your best posts…
If you’ve struck on a post that’s generated more social media engagement than expected, there’s nothing wrong with boosting that post. In fact, the Seek Social team would definitely encourage it! Boosting a post won’t generate engagement on Facebook all by itself… but it will make sure that your best content gets seen by your followers. Once that happens, who knows who else they might forward it to? Boosting a post helps to strengthen the bond you have with your fans, as well as exposing new audiences to your brand and your content. And if that’s not worth the occasional $25, we don’t know what is!
Use Audience Targeting…
Just like Facebook Ads, you can also aim your posts at a specific audience by using the ‘Audience Targeting’ feature. This is a really useful technique for more advanced Facebook users, and when employed in the right circumstances it can really give your social media engagement a boost. We won’t lie, targeting your posts does have the drawback of limiting the audience that will see your content… In the Seek Social team’s opinion though, if you’ve already identified a specific group of people that you know will like what you’re offering, that trade-off is one we could certainly live with. Why? Since you’re not looking for a needle in a haystack anymore, even a smaller ‘overall’ audience may well yield more engagement on Facebook than would the standard approach.
Adjust your post frequency…
Okay, this might not strictly be an ‘advanced Facebook functionality’ like boosting a post or Audience Targeting, but it’s still something that can both a) often go overlooked, and b) really affect the amount of social media engagement you get. Seek Social know that there’s an art to this though. Post too little and the almighty algorithm won’t see you as any more relevant to your audience than the old school friends they never talk to. Post too often though, and the algorithm might see you as attempting to spam. This will mean that it simply won’t show all your content to all your followers. The trick is to find the right number of posts per day and the timeslots that work for you. Seek Social would also advise posting at times when your audience are likely available to provide social media engagement. Unfortunately this can just come down to good old-fashioned educated guesswork and hunches, but it’s worth it. Once you find that sweet spot, your engagement on Facebook will go up and up!
Rethink your use of hashtags…
At first glance, using hashtags might seem like an advanced Facebook engagement tactic… Hashtags are often seen more as a Twitter and Instagram feature after all, though they also work on Facebook. However, research from BuzzSumo doesn’t back that up. Their results showed that using hashtags in a post doesn’t really help your rate of social media engagement on Facebook. In fact, it might even harm it. Therefore, the Seek Social team’s advice is to think twice. Where on other platforms we’d use all the hashtags we can, things aren’t the same on the big blue behemoth… On Facebook we’d only use hashtags to tap into trending topics, and even then, we’d use them sparingly.
