Successfully marketing your businesses on Facebook isn’t just about the number of fans that you have. Now certainly, the more fans you have the better (overall) but what you also need is an engaged audience.
In other words, successful Facebook marketing is all about interaction, rather than just you publishing content and nobody responding to it.
Not only is a highly engaged audience far more likely to see you as a trusted authority and end up buying from you, but in addition Facebook’s EdgeRank formula – which determines what posts you see in your newsfeed – is also set up to reward posts that get a lot of interaction.
In this way by building engagement with your Facebook audience you’ll find more and more people actually see your status updates, leading to more marketing leverage overall.
So what can we do to actively drive engagement with our fans, and in doing so significantly increase the results we’re seeing from our marketing efforts?
Share Images
Images tend to get far more engagement than many other types of content principally because they are so eye-catching in your feed. So when you’re sharing content from your site, don’t just paste a bare old link into the box.
Instead, use Creative Commons licensing to find the best royalty free images you can and then upload these to Facebook. Add a little text and a link to your article and you’ll find far more people like and share your post, and the traffic you receive as a result will also be far higher than usual.
Ask Questions
Questions are a great way to build interaction and engagement because people love to give their opinions. A smart idea is to frequent popular forums in your niche, as well as sites like Quora, Reddit and Yahoo Answers, to find questions that keep cropping up again and again. Then find ways to turn these ideas into questions you can ask your fans on Facebook.
Create A Simple Poll
While Facebook has a simple “poll” option for status updates, we’ve seen far better results on our Facebook page by simply asking an “A or B” question by typing it into the status box.
For example if you were in the pet niche, you could ask people if they prefer cats or dogs. if you were in the sport niche you could try pitting soccer against basketball and so on. As these are “opinion-based” questions there are no right or wrong answers and it can be a fun way to encourage your fans to take part in your page.
Facebook Comments
Did you know that you can now let your blog visitors leave their comments using Facebook? If you’re driving traffic from Facebook to your site, using a WordPress comments plugin that displays your visitors comments directly on your Facebook page can be very powerful indeed.
Not only does it make commenting easier for your visitors but in addition all those extra comments showing up on Facebook can kick-start the virality of any content that you share with your fans.
Be Personable
People like businesses that have a public figure as the “leader”. Think of Steve Jobs from Apple or Richard Branson from Virgin. In other words, when you’re interacting on your Facebook page, try not to do it just as a “brand” but as an individual.
Share stories about yourself. Use your name. Show people you’re a real person and they’ll mentally build up an image of you and will feel more rapport between you.
Respond To Comments
Finally, nobody likes to leave a comment only for it to languish unloved after all their effort. So instead, try to be the most regular visitor to your Facebook fan page. Log on regularly and interact with others. Respond to their comments. Speak to them as valued individuals and they’ll be far more likely to continue interacting with you and engaging with your brand.
Our Guest Author: Richard Adams is a UK-based technology writer whose popular ebook entitled “How To Promote Your Blog” teaches dozens of ways to increase traffic to your website.