Charming the Facebook Gatekeeper so your updates get seen

How To Improve Facebbok engagement

It’s frustrating not getting any comments, likes or shares.

You post an insightful link and tumbleweeds blow by. You let everyone know about a new product or sale you’re having and you hear nothing but crickets.

No matter what you post there’s very little in the way of comments or engagement. You might think this will change when you get more likes. Well I’ve already talked about how the need for social proof and more likes can really hurt your updates from getting seen.

Instead focus on increasing engagement with your current followers. This will give your updates a better opportunity to be seen by the fans you do have. Getting more engagement drives your Facebook EdgeRank score up and allows your updates to be seen more often in peoples news feeds.

So how can you generate more engagement on Facebook?

Read on and I’ll explain a practical way to do just that.

I do a lot of reading online. Much of it is on marketing related stuff. Shocking, I know. What I see is a lot of cookie cutter posts on ways you’re supposed to increase engagement.

Just take a look and what comes up when I search “how to increase fan engagement”.

how to increase facebook engagement

Here’s a summary of these posts. They tell you to ask questions, create surveys and watch what time you post. I will agree that watching what time you update is important. But how does one figure that out?

I’ve yet to come across a post that talks about doing this. Frankly I’m shocked. So what exactly is it?

Analyzing your timeline! When you do this you’ll see what content and updates people are engaging with the most.

Think about this, when a basketball team gets blown out, the coaches analyze the tape from that game. From that tape they can see what adjustments need to be made.

Treat your Facebook updates in the same way.

Analyze and Test

 
In marketing testing is very important but so overlooked. This includes what you post on your Facebook page. Observe what’s happening with those posts by tracking the data.

I’ve gone through and created a sample spreadsheet you can download here. Now I want you to go way back and take a look at your last 40 updates and fill in the spreadsheet I have provided.

On that spreadsheet I’ve listed:

  • day of update
  • time of update(keep track of this when you track from now on)
  • type of content posted (link/article/blog post, photo, quote, regular status update and what it’s context, question/survey)
  • shares
  • comments
  • likes

I encourage you to keep track of this data moving forward. That’s the reason for the time of update row. There are tools like Crowdbooster that tell you this but I’ve found the data they use to be too short term.

I’m confident that by tracking the data you’ll get a clear picture of what to post and when to post. This approach is far more practical because the data is all there, you simply need to analyze it.

This makes more sense than taking 5 tips from many of the social media blogs doesn’t it? They don’t know your fans or your business or what you’ve posted. Only you know that. By observing and testing you’ll find out a lot.

That is the most practical approach to getting the most out of your current fans. Focus more on them and what they like.

If you still find that your enagagement is low, you better read this post on three ways you can increase engagement on your Facebook business page.

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What do you think?

 
Does this approach make sense and do you have the time to analyze your Facebook updates?