How to Increase Your Facebook Engagement by 330%

While there are plenty of different metrics brands can measure when it comes to social media, one of the most important is undoubtedly engagement. When your audience engages with your content by liking, commenting or sharing, they’re boosting your reach by exposing their network to your posts.

Of course, an engaged audience is one that’s more likely to pay for your products or services, so ultimately this should be your overall goal. It’s possible to make huge gains in this metric with a few simple changes. In fact, one brand managed to boost their engagement by an amazing 330%! Here’s how:

Reduce the amount you post

Buffer was having an engagement problem in 2016. The more they posted, the less reach and engagement they received on each post. To tackle this, the firm decided to experiment by cutting the amount it posted from 25-40 times a week to roughly half that figure. As a result, they saw their engagement triple.

The problem was that nobody is going to engage with bad or boring content, and - as Buffer discovered - it’s extremely hard to maintain a high level of quality when you’re posting more than five times per day. Focus on providing your audience with content that’s interesting or useful, rather than on the quantity of posts you put out there, and your engagement should increase.

Be visual wherever possible

As a rule, audiences love visual content. This is true across social media, with Instagram reaching a billion monthly users in June last year and posts with images achieving around 150% more retweets on Twitter. Facebook is no different, and good use of images will make your posts much more likely to reach a higher level of engagement.

If you can’t think of a picture that goes with what you’ve written, use an emoji. The simple addition of this small visual element increases engagement by an average of 15% - and if you're using more visual means of social engagement such as Instagram in addition to Facebook, the returns are even higher.

Grab attention quickly

One of the biggest keys to getting more engagement on Facebook is to get to the point quickly, in a way that’s likely to grab your audience’s attention. Around 88% of users access Facebook via mobile devices, and while doing so they’re likely to swipe through their newsfeed swiftly. In fact, you only have an average of 1.7 seconds to engage them before they swipe past your post.

A large part of grabbing attention is to get straight to the point and ensure you’re posting high-quality content, but Facebook has some advice on best practice when it comes to engaging an audience. It recommends you keep things simple, with immediately recognizable images and a clean, consistent color scheme for the best results.