Facebook – Engagement 101
Engagement is a Facebook metric that gives a page owner insight on user activities on the Page. If your content doesn’t get your audience to stop scrolling through their feed, your content isn’t engaging enough.
Engagement is not just a badge or blue tick – it tells you more about your fans’ loyalty as well as what interests them. If your content is too generic, has no value for your audience, and you don’t interact with them, they cannot establish any kind of relationship with you.
How is Facebook’s Engagement Rate Measured?
This formula can derive the engagement rate:
Reactions + Shares + Link Clicks + Event Responses
———————————————————————————
Number of Followers (Organic) or Reach (Paid)
Increasing your Engagement – Yay or Nay?
Here are some reasons why you should consider increasing engagement with your audience:
Evidence
Reactions (likes), comments, shares, and interactions are evidence of your brand’s existence and make you look reliable. Whenever an incentive is offered, entertaining or useful content is uploaded, customers’ brand loyalty increases.
Reach
A higher engagement rate most definitely means more organic reach on social media as well as substantially more paid marketing reach.
Facebook’s proprietary algorithm tends to drive higher traffic to that content, which gets more attention – this means the posts or ads that typically do well predictably get more exposure, leading to better performance.
As the Engagement on your posts goes up, so does the chance of achieving virality.
Cost
In plain sight, getting a specific audience to engage with your brand is a lot cheaper in comparison to traditional formats like Billboards and TVC’s.
Awareness
Whether you’re starting afresh or are an already established business, high Engagement translates to increased brand awareness. Brand awareness is crucial to building street cred or even maintaining a sparkly image.
How to Increase Engagement with your audiences using Paid Marketing
While Engagement has lots to do with the quality of content you share, Facebook’s ads manager has an engagement objective which is designed to increase audience engagement with your post or Page. You can now create ads that:
Boost your posts
This post engagement objective lets you drive your Facebook posts to relevant audiences who are more likely to interact with them over and above the fans that already follow you.
Promote your Page
This objective gets likes and followership from Facebook users who are more likely to relate to your page / enjoy the content you upload/make use of the information you share.
Get people to claim an offer on your Page
Offers are discounts/coupons you can share with an audience on Facebook to encourage them to shop on your website, at your physical store, or both places.
When people see your offer in their News Feed on Facebook, they can save it, like it, or comment on it – further building on your page engagement efforts.
Raise attendance at an event on your Page
This objective lets you collect responses for an event you’re hosting. While a user may select Interested or Attending, their friends’ circle gets to see the Engagement, getting more people interested.
Creative Formats
Engagement ads may be in the below formats:
- Static
- Video
- Carousel
- Slideshow
COVID-19 and the rise of Engagement
Sounds like a movie title. It isn’t.
With people socially distancing and businesses slowing down, a lot of brands have resorted to e-Engagement. Hello Facebook and Instagram!
Here are some mediums that brands are using to engage with their fan bases:
Facebook Live
Go live on Facebook to broadcast a conversation, performance, Q&A, or virtual event. When broadcasting live, your community has the opportunity to join the conversation and ask questions, comment, react, or just follow along in real-time.
Instagram Live
Just like on Facebook, going live is a simple way to create a virtual event.
Video
Nothing captures attention like video. Use exciting motion and sound to build and maintain engagement with your audience.
Online Events
Facebook and Instagram have a comprehensive set of tools to help you organize online events. Example use cases may include:
- As a media company, you want to host a talk show virtually and engage with viewers
- As a news organization, you want to host a community meeting with ticketed access
- As a chef, you want to schedule and promote a virtual cooking class
