Facebook for Business Part 3: Engagement and Analytics

Facebook for Business Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

• 1 in 3 customers go to a competitor if they’re ignored on social media.
• 89% of social messages are ignored by brands.

This highlights why engagement is so critical on social media (after all, social media is supposed to be social.)

We had already discussed a bit about how consistency in posting to Facebook is important, now we will talk engagement. Engaging with your customers on social media is critical to obtaining and maintaining your customers, as the statistics above show.

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You want to be actively engaging with your customers, even if you’re making a 15-minute appointment with yourself every day to do so.  As we mentioned in our last post, scheduling this appointment with yourself is a great way to make sure that you devote a small amount of time consistently to engaging with your customers who have liked, commented, or shared one of your posts.

If you have a larger business, you may need some additional strategies, and especially if you use Facebook for support issues.  34.5% of users choose social media as the top choice for customer service. If you are receiving a lot of support requests on Facebook, you may want to consider having staff to handle those requests so that your customers will be served.

What’s important to remember is that you need to be actively responding to your customers, you can’t just post it and forget it.

Facebook Engagement Best Practices

Never resort to “click bait”. Whether you’re posting it yourself or sharing something that you find online, those types of headlines and articles can get flagged by Facebook’s algorithm and cause your post and perhaps your page to be shown to even fewer people.

One example is a story I saw years ago about a couple of guys I think in England who had raised a lion cub, and later released it in the wild. About a year after that, they returned to find the lion, who ran up to them and gave them a big lion hug. Recently I saw an article shared about this same story – I recognized the photo – with a headline something like “Man tries to hug a wild lion, you won’t believe what happens next”. While the wording alone can be enough to flag it on Facebook’s algorithm, the fact that the page you land on is filled with a ton of ads that causes a decreased loading time also causes a flag, and sharing this type of article would actually damage my impressions and engagement on Facebook.

If it looks like clickbait, don’t do it.

You also want to mix up post types, and be sure to consider using Live videos (it’s not as scary as you think – we have tons of Facebook Live tips). As we noted in Part 2 of this series, Facebook Live videos have a much higher engagement and viewing rate than other videos on Facebook – higher than sharing a link from YouTube and even higher than simply uploading a native video directly to Facebook. Videos in general have the highest engagement rate out of all of the different content types. You also want to be using images, text, link and other types of posts as well. If it takes 11 times for someone to even see your message, and throw in that people have different preferred learning styles, then you want to make sure you’re hitting on all of those styles possible and consistently.

Use analytics and research to find your best posting time for your audience, as well as the best posting tempo. We have a free eBook that covers the Best Times to Post; posting tempo may be something you have to do a bit deeper research with your individual audience to determine. Luckily, Facebook insights on your page will provide a wealth of information.

Use emotion – make your audience feel something. Anger likely won’t be the emotion you want to invoke, although it can have its place. (Just please don’t use “outrage porn” – we have enough of that.) As we have noted previously, happy posts work great on Fridays. There are lots of other ways you can use emotion as well, even the emotion of a celebration such as a birthday or a milestone achieved for your business can work well.

Ask your followers to turn on notifications for your page. This is easy for them to do, but they need to be ASKED to do so, and likely told how to do so. After they’ve liked your page, they can find this setting by clicking on the Following button right below your page cover photo, click Edit, and then choose See First.

Try a user-generated content campaign. UGC is always something that we recommend because it comes with engagement built in. Consider what type of UGC campaign you can run. Our Facebook Group Marketing Guidebook contains some great ideas for these types of posts (and even though this guidebook is designed specifically for Groups, many of the concepts and content ideas work great on your Page as well.)

Facebook Page Analytics and Advertising

Paying attention to even basic analytics can help you understand what type of content works best on your Facebook Page. Here’s a few you may want to follow:

• Impressions: Total number of times any content from your Page was seen in a News Feed, ticker or by visits to your Page.
• Post Engagement: Total number of comments, shares or reactions to your posts.
• Link Clicks: Total number of clicks on links with your content (excludes other clicks such as photo, video or post expansion clicks). A type of engagement.
• Organic Likes: Total number of new users who liked your Page by organic (unpaid) reach.
• Unlikes: Total number of users that unliked your Page. Don’t fret over this – you want engaged users, so if a user decides to unlike your page, it can actually improve your overall engagement rate a bit, which Facebook’s algorithm will like.
• Net Likes: Total number of paid or organic Likes minus the amount of Unlikes.
• Total Fans: Total number of users who liked your Page from the last day or the report period.

At some point, you will also want to consider Facebook Pay Per Click advertising. I never recommend that you simply use the “Boost Post” button under a post that you’ve made. Facebook’s advertising platform gives you great control over the audience and many other factors, so that is the route you want to use.

Coming Soon: Our Facebook Pay Per Click Course

This control lets you tightly target your audience, which is an amazingly efficient way to run ads. Facebook’s average cost per click $1.72, and the exact average can depend upon your industry. For example, the lowest industry average is Apparel at 45 cents, and topping the scale is Financial at $3.77. Still a great buy for someone to actively be interested in your product or service enough to visit your website or offer.

Vicky Wu

Vicky is the CEO and Chief Creative Strategist of Vicky Wu Marketing. She draws from 30 years of experience at the CMO level, the CEO level, marketing for Fortune 500 companies and multi-million and multi-billion-dollar organizations, PLUS strategies learned helping startups and nonprofits with limited budgets … now focusing on providing SMBs with effective and efficient marketing strategies – giving them access to the same level of expertise as the really big guys with deep pockets, that they may not otherwise be able to access.