Ghosted By Your Audience? Try These Facebook Engagement Tactics

Have you ever had a personal relationship in your life where you invested a ton of time and energy into it and yet received very little or nothing in return? In some cases like this, you might have felt downright ghosted, leaving you not wanting to maintain that relationship at all.

Painful, right?

Well, if you have had this experience, believe it or not, social media engagement is a lot like our interpersonal relationships. If you are a business struggling to get a single comment or painfully waiting to get a “like” on Facebook, you might think that your target audience is ghosting you when you are making the efforts to show up, create content and post on social media!

Sound familiar?

If so, you might be wondering how on earth you can use Facebook as a way to develop, build, and nurture relationships when you are in these situations, but good news! Not all is lost and you are not meant to sit out in the silent void of social media platforms!

In this article, you will learn Facebook engagement tactics you can use to get more likes, comments, and followers on your business page. Leave the ghosts for haunted houses and learn how you can better connect and create engaging relationships with your target audiences on social platforms!

Ghosted No More: 10 Facebook Engagement Tactics

As stated above, social media is a lot like our personal relationships in life: We get what we put into the relationships we are trying to build!

Unfortunately, many times we treat social media a lot like a one-way street where we put unrealistic expectations on our target audience to perform the way we want to with little effort on our part.

That would be a pretty unhealthy way to treat a personal relationship, right?

Businesses make this mistake all the time: showing up and expecting to be engaged with, yet they do not make the efforts to engage with their audiences. What businesses need to understand about social media, particularly Facebook, is it’s all about showing up with the intention of BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS.

Social media platforms like Facebook require you to make long-term efforts to build meaningful relationships and brand awareness. Facebook is not about showing up and posting once and having your post be a top-performer. It is not about sharing one helpful piece of content and then–BOOM!–all types of DM requests come in of people wanting to buy or book with you.

Posting on Facebook and other social media platforms is like showing up to your first day of classes and getting to know the other students in the room. You cannot expect everyone to immediately want to be your study buddy, you can’t expect that simply posting is enough to get the engagement you desire.

You will have to put in efforts to start the engagement!

So, below, let’s take a look at how you can relate personal relationships with Facebook engagement tactics you can try to get your audiences going!

1. Be Creatively Multi-Faceted: Break Comfort Zones

Many brands make the mistake of putting themselves in a small box by creating content that is solely about what they sell. For example, if you are running a Facebook page for your soap shop, should you exclusively post content relating to soap?

Heck no!

It’s easy to share content that is comfortable like that, but most of the time, posts that are solely about products are shallow in content value. This limits your ability to dive deeper with your intended audience!

So, it’s important to show more aspects of your business beyond face value.

Looking at the most popular social posts from 2017 as highlighted by Buzzsumo, this sort of content makes people click without fail:

• Heartwarming stories
• Quizzes
• Shocking or surprising statistics
• How-to guides and supportive content
• Opinion pieces that take bold stances

So, for better Facebook engagement, think of a few facets of your business you can share and rotate those on a weekly/monthly basis. This can be sharing products, how to’s, customer stories,  social media polls, reviews, video etc. By mixing up content this way, your Facebook feed becomes multidimensional and interesting to your audience.

If you need some more ideas of ways you can dive deeper into your business content, consider thinking about:

• Real-world events you can easily relate to your business (hint, ask for opinions)
• Facts and stats that relate to your target audience and your business/products
• Emotional marketing tactics that make target audience members “feel” something in relation to your business
• Visual content (it kills on Facebook)
• Create guides and downloadables with helpful information relating to your products/business
• Promote customer pictures and content to be featured using hashtags and share them on your page

Share what you’re comfortable with and look for ways to break out of your business box in a relevant and creative way! This allows people to engage with content that is more meaningful for both them and your business!

2. Be Focused: Mountains or Molehills?

Social media makes you hyper-focus on numbers. Whether it is the number of likes or followers one thing is for sure: engagement is what matters, not numbers.

So, ask yourself if your numbers are worth the stress mountains you make them out to be (they probably aren’t).

On Facebook, engagement metrics are calculated based on the number of likes, comments, shares, and clicks your posts are generating (AHEM, not followers). Facebook’s algorithm then uses page engagement to determine which news feeds your posts will show up in and the overall reach of your posts.

Instead of stewing over vanity metrics, gauge your true Facebook engagement by tracking:

• Likes: The number of people who click the like button on your post.
• Comments: The number of people who comment on your posts. These are visible on your page, found under the post the user commented on.
• Shares: The number of times a user shares your post on their own page. This will show in their timelines as well.
• Clicks: The number of times a user clicks on an image or link in your post. This will take users to the link you choose.
• Reach: The number of people who have seen your post in their timelines. For boosted posts (Facebook Ads), you will be shown the organic and paid reach.

If you are seeing an overall increase is engagement, post reach and website visits from Facebook, you are doing pretty good, my friend! Don’t worry your pretty head over things that do not matter. Ask yourself if the superficial things in life are mountains or molehills when gauging your actual success.

Don’t get caught up in that stuff on Facebook! It’s not a popularity contest!

3. Be a Giver: You Get More Flies with Honey

Social media is all about the efforts you put into it, and mostly it’s what you can give to your audience.

Now, before you start thinking that statement means you should be sprinkling promos like confetti, know that it’s not about giving things away. It’s all about creating value.

You want to give your target audience content that’s valuable to them more than you ask them to buy what you’re selling. They key is to give the same type of Facebook engagement you want for your own account:

• Leave meaningful comments on posts (beyond passively liking posts)
• Create awesome customer review feedback
• Promote occasional sales and discounts
• Engage or host in-person events
• Share behind the scenes images
• Visit your top fan personal pages and send promo codes to their inboxes
• Promote client made content

Just like you would for a healthy personal relationship, to be successful you need to give more than you want to receive. Do not make social media a one-way street and expect people to follow! Give, give, give!

4. Be True to Yourself: You Won’t Be Everything to Everyone

As a business, of course, you want to be a thought leader and an authority to reckon with online, but you need to stay relevant and focused on people who are actually willing to invest in your business, not the whole Facebook world!

You need to focus on being profitable, not popular!

In personal relationships, this rings true as well because you want to have quality friends over a quantity of friends, right? You cannot be everything to everyone, so when you stretch your Facebook ads and content to a wide range of people, you become bland and irrelevant.

Serve a small group of people in a highly profitable way so that they tell their friends and amplify your brand. This type of growth, although it will take longer, will be more meaningful for your business. Jump through the hoops to get genuine engagement from people who will actually buy from you.

Think about creating buyer personas and truly manage the type of content those people want to see and engage with. Do not think you know what that is, test it and be fully committed to your Facebook tribe!

If they are photo people, you better sure as hell have photos all over your Facebook business page. If they are video content people, your engagement will rise if you speak to them that way!

The masses, unless you are a huge corporation, will not pay the bills, so ensure that you are focusing your efforts on your target audience!

5. Be Involved: Create Bridges

Let’s be honest, no worthwhile business relationship can endure without mutual respect, interaction and consideration. With that said, if you are not communicating with your customers, you are missing out on great opportunities to grow. Customers want to interact and be a part of the conversations your business is having, instead of being told to simply “buy” or “not buy.”

A lot of times, marketing campaigns miss the mark by having one-way communication with their customers: A marketer will design a great advertisement, place it out on the internet and wait for the results to flow in. Unfortunately, this is a poor way to market your business as you are relaying a forced message to customers. BORING!

Today, customers expect responsiveness and inclusion in brand initiatives. This is where interactive marketing comes into play!

So, in your Facebook posts, look for ways to spark conversation:

• Ask questions
• Create real-world social events
• Gather opinions
• Share interactive polls and quizzes to gather information
• Engage with comment conversations
• Reward loyalty and shares

By being interactive, your audience will be more likely to engage because they feel like you are actually responding and appreciating their efforts to engage! Look for ways to create content bridges between you and your target audience!

6. Be Honest: A Fair Exchange is Not Robbery

Honesty is the best policy, right? Just like you would expect honesty from your loved ones, your business is being held to that same accountability by your audience.

As consumer confidence on social media is rocky, you need to ensure you are creating relatable transparency to fill in the gaps. Personalization will be key as people are sick of being constantly bombarded with ads. Ways you can do this are:

• Promote a name and face to a business that promotes feelings of connection
• Use more behind the scenes and transparent content
• Be upfront about what is paid and what is not
• Create funny responses to mistakes when appropriate—it humanizes your business!
• Create ads that seem likes like ads through storytelling and creative ad copy
• Use influencer marketing responsibly and honestly
• Share milestones and progress
• Be transparent and apologize for mishaps or problems

By being honest with your audience, people will automatically develop trust in your business. That virtue alone will be a huge differentiator for businesses in 2019 and onward!

7. Be Inclusive: You Never Regret Taking the High Road

In life, sometimes it’s easy to ignore people who are unkind, but in business, you need to ensure you are engaging with everyone: fans and foes alike!

There will be times, whether you like it or not, that people will leave negative comments or reviews on your Facebook page. Whether they are working up an elaborate untrue story or you genuinely made some mistakes as a business, it’s always best to take the high road.

Public negativity towards your business can have a significant impact on sales, so it’s important to engage with unhappy customers just as much as the happy ones to try to resolve problems. Direct messaging can be a great way to resolve issues privately, effectively and personally with unhappy customers. The efforts will be appreciated and remembered.

When you make holistic efforts to respond to everyone who engages with your Facebook business page, you are seen as a business who truly cares for their audience! People see how you engage and respond to everything, so make sure you are on top of it!

8. Be Direct: Good Things Happen to Those Who Hustle

Sometimes, businesses simply are afraid to ask for engagement.

It feels awkward, forward and cheap to some, but if you craft engaging calls to action, you dismiss those feelings greatly.

Hope is NOT a strategy.

If you haven’t used calls to action in your posts before, it might be time to think about what actions you’re asking your followers to take when they are engaging with your posts. At the end of every single post, you should be able to clearly see what action a viewer should take. If not, it’s time to reshape the post messaging and work it towards a business goal.

Repeat after me, EVERY POST SHOULD POINT BACK TO A BUSINESS GOAL.

So, be intentional with each post you put on Facebook and include some engagement piece for your followers:

• Ask for a double tap
• Pose a question
• Have them tag a friend
• Promote a share
• Invite them to engage with an interactive post

Whatever the ask is, be sure to include an engagement beyond just viewing the post to boost your algorithm odds!

9. Be Active: Business Heaven is Not for the Slothful

Social media continues to change on a daily basis, so when we are managing social media pages, like Facebook, we need to learn how to pivot when a new change impacts the way we are reaching our clients online. Social media is not a passive avenue to reach customers. You have to be engaged at least once or twice a day to be actively apart of your target audiences social media experience for the day.

Some of the ways you can actively be on top of your Facebook engagement is to utilize:

• Perfect timing: The more engagement a post receives, the more likely Facebook’s algorithm is to reward it with reach. By posting when your followers are most active, you instantly increase the likelihood of getting likes and comments.
• Response rate: There is nothing worse than waiting a week later to hear back from a business about a comment or question you posed to them. If people are taking the time to engage with you, take a few minutes to comment back, thank them, or even hop over to their feed and return the favor.
• Community building: It’s easy to mindlessly scroll and post but what would it look like if you logged in and spent 20 minutes encouraging people you follow/people who follow you? Set a timer and have the intention of fostering community. Reach out to your followers and like their photos, leave comments, etc.
• Hashtags: While comparing Facebook to Instagram might be apples and oranges, posts on the latter with hashtags receive 12.6% more engagement than those without them. For every post you publish, you have many opportunities to use great hashtags to gain more eyeballs to your posts! In fact, a study of over 200,000 brand posts on Facebook found that content with one or two hashtags had 593 interactions, on average.

Facebook success really comes down to being actively involved in your own content and the people you are wanting to reach. Look for ways you can be more active, not passive.

10. Be Introspective: Knowing Yourself is the Beginning of All Wisdom

As crazy as it sounds, sometimes the key to increasing Facebook engagement is to look at yourself as a business.

Go through your posts and see which are your top performers, take a close look at your Facebook analytics to see firsthand what’s receiving the most reach. Analyze your top posts and look at the marketing elements that made them successful—especially from an engagement perspective.

From the mouth of your Facebook engagers, you shall understand what worked. At that point, you can reverse engineer your future Facebook posts to be just as engaging as those ones!

Boo Away Low Engagement: Welcome a New Beginning

After you read these tips, you no longer need to fear being ghosted be your target audience.

By leveraging social media pages as a communication tool, not a sales or lead gen tool, you are giving customers a reason to engage with you without feeling pressure. This will help them feel respected, helped and appreciated—not like they’re another number on your quota hit list.

If you want to make money using Facebook, you need to go out and find as many people as you can help to achieve their goals or solve their problems. When you are the answer, your goals will take care of themselves.

Incidentally, if you need help tweaking your Facebook and other social media post to be more engaging, reach out to us at Disruptive! See what I just did there? A quick, low-key call to action. Remember, ask people to engage!

What is stopping you from getting the engagement you want to see on Facebook and your other social media profiles? What are your struggles? Comment and share below!