Facebook ideas that generate high engagement

Modern businesses and marketing teams are constantly seeking new ways to increase their engagement and encourage their audience to comment, like, and share their Facebook posts. These actions have a mathematical ripple effect: increasing your favorability in Facebook’s algorithm causes your posts to pop up on more feeds.

With so much content on Facebook, how can you make yours stand out? How can you earn those coveted likes, comments, and shares? Through strategic content, captions, and timing, there are a few simple ways to make your Facebook account really shine.

Content

The absolute best way to drive up engagement and maximize authentic interactions is through genuine, high-quality visual content. Whatever your brand’s niche, it’s important to post original and professional images and videos in high definition. This is the most important aspect which heavily impacts your brand’s success across all social media channels. Once you have the visuals at their highest quality, there are many ways to get creative and draw your audience to comment and like your photos. A few tips include:

• Give viewers a behind the scenes look at an important part of your business. Consumers value transparency and will be more loyal to businesses or social media pages that they know more about.
• Show your personality. Don’t only take pictures of the product, share the vibe of the business itself! Don’t be afraid to take a selfie, or to post photos of the team.
• Share fan content. People love to get a shoutout, so this will incentivize consumers to post about you on their pages. Fan content also highlights your many loyal customers.
• Do not hesitate to share relevant, useful content from other businesses in your niche, as long as they are not direct competitors. This will drive part of their audience to your page and allow you to target different social media users. As with fan content, make sure to always credit the original post.
• Switch it up with videos. Humans crave variety, and scrolling through our newsfeeds is no different. Adding a video to your audience’s news feed of photos has the potential to significantly increase engagement!
• If you want to share an inspirational or funny quote, consider turning it into an image. Photos tend to receive much higher engagement than plain text.
• Don’t be afraid to be a little silly! An account that takes itself too seriously can be quite the dud. Making your audience laugh could be the key to record shares, likes, and comments.

Captions

Captions serve a multitude of purposes: only one of which is to inform the viewer about the photo above it. Captions are a fantastic way to increase engagement and encourage viewers to sound off in the comments. Many business social media accounts try to provide information, while accounts that elicit a response tend to receive much more engagement. Here are a few of our favorites:

• Fan preferences. Asking fans what they want to see is a great way to get feedback, driving up engagement and providing you with valuable insights on what content appeals to your niche.
• Conversation starters. These can be about your brand, industry, photo content, or they can be general conversation starters.
• Ask a controversial (but not too controversial) opinion. This could simply be a matter of asking your audience to vote in the comments on which photo, idea, or product they prefer.
• Giveaways. If you have the option to give out a free product or discount, this is a great way to drive up engagement. Ask your audience to tag two friends to enter the giveaway, and randomly select a winner at the end of the contest.

Timing

Facebook’s algorithm is extremely sensitive to timing. When you post and on what day of the week is nearly as important as what you post. When researching your engagement metrics, there are a few timing parameters to which you should pay close attention.

• Patterns. What type of content received the most engagement? What time did you post these photos? Facebook’s business tools make it easy to decipher your account’s personalized timing patterns and apply them to future posts.
• Don’t take a day off. Your audience is likely to be more engaged on weekends, so make sure to post on those days. Many social media accounts take Saturdays and Sundays off, so you’ll have an advantage if you don’t. Facebook even has a “Schedule Post” feature, so you can share content even when you are off the job.
• Trending topics. The news feed algorithm rewards posts that contain trending keywords, and will make them more visible to your audience. Keeping a finger on the pulse of social media will increase favorability and drive up engagement.

Have you tried any of these tips? What strategies are your favorite for increasing engagement? Let me know in the comments below!