This guest post was written by Amanda Kendle
So can you get engagement on your Facebook without really trying, I hear you ask? Sounds too good to be true but honestly all the advice I’m about to give you boils down to this one thing: don’t try too hard, just be yourself. But for many of us this isn’t anywhere near as simple as it sounds, so I’m going to help you out with a few more specific tips.
1. Remember you’re competing with friends
If you’re posting as your Facebook business page, you need to work really hard to fit in with what’s in the rest of your audience’s Facebook feed – news of babies and weddings and breakfasts and funny cats posted by their friends. After all, people usually open Facebook to see what their friends are up to, not to find out what the businesses they follow are promoting. This doesn’t mean you should ditch everything and just post photos of every meal and selfies with your dog – but it does mean you should consider what you write and the images you post in the context of this.
2. Be conversational
It sounds simple, right: just write like you talk! In practice, when you know it’s your business page publishing your update, this can get tricky. You need to figure out your business “voice”, and on Facebook, this shouldn’t sound too formal or technical. No matter what the topic, think about how you would explain it to somebody who was physically standing next to you (someone you feel comfortable with, too). If you’re used to writing formal written reports or doing a lot of academic writing this can be extra tricky, so try recording yourself talking about these things verbally and transcribing what you say.
3. Encourage people to talk back
This is common advice given to Facebook business page owners – ask questions to get people to engage. But what I often see happening is pages post a fairly meaningless question and it’s obvious that it’s just to get engagement (and it often fails). Instead, share something about your own experience first and then ask a meaningful question. Alternatively, ask for genuine advice and make sure you engage with those who leave comments.
4. Include some fun in the mix
I may have said you shouldn’t just post selfies with your dog … but there probably is a case for the occasional one! Not all your posts should be promotional – in fact a pretty small proportion should be directly promotional, while others can be tangentially mentioning some aspect of your work – and the odd animal never goes astray. Just try to link them back to your work – whether that’s a cat who walks across your keyboard constantly making you type odd words or a budgie who sits on top of your laptop staring at you (one of my clients has a bird like that and honestly, he freaks me out a bit – would he fly down and peck my fingers if I make a typo?).
5. Be useful, inspiring and educational
You may not be all these things at once but aim for a mix of posts that help your audience in various ways. If you reading your posts is a consistently rewarding experience then your followers will get into the habit of stopping their scroll whenever they see your logo or face flash up, and obviously you’re then well on the way to excellent engagement.
Amanda Kendle works with all kinds of people to help them understand the strategy behind blogging and social media, figure out the content that works and learn how to do it efficiently so that being online doesn’t eat into doing the real work they love.