8 tips to increase engagement (likes, shares, etc.) on your Facebook posts!

To ensure effective digital communication, you have chosen Facebook — ideal for a B2C brand. But you feel your page lacks fans, and that too few people comment on or share your posts.
How can you increase engagement on your Facebook page? How can you energise your community and get more shares, likes, or fans to reach a wider audience? Today's 8 tips are so many avenues to explore in order to improve the effectiveness of your Facebook page.

1. Vary your post types

Internet users enjoy routine but get bored easily. Find the right balance to accustom them to your brand, create implicit regular appointments with them, without losing their interest.

Varying your post types is a great way to keep your Facebook page lively. Here are the different types of Facebook posts in descending order of engagement, from most to least:

Questions
Posts with images
Videos
Links
Competitions
Promotions

It is worth noting that these post types can be combined (a question with an image, for instance), and that trends vary from one period to another and from one page to another. For example, sharing links is gradually losing its impact whilst videos are increasingly popular.

2. Keep it concise

Facebook users receive dozens of pieces of information per minute in their feed. And they are easily put off by a large block of text.
Get to the point and keep it as short as possible. Under 50 characters will yield the best results. The further you stray from this limit, the more engagement you will lose (with engagement being twice as low for a post of 300 to 350 characters).

3. Don't overwhelm your fans with posts

Nobody likes being flooded with information. Posting 10 messages in an hour, then nothing for two weeks, is the surest way to drive people away from a fledgling page or one with a relatively small community. (Things are different for a page that already has thousands of fans.)

Do you have several messages to get across? Schedule them in order of importance. Can one of them wait a few hours, or even until tomorrow?

Posting several times in a row is not as damaging if it is an occasional occurrence. Users will not flee at the first burst of posts; it is their recurrence that will tire them.

This is all the more regrettable given that users enjoy routine and will far prefer a page that posts regularly, at spaced intervals, over one that fires off all its ammunition in the first few days and then goes silent for the following four weeks.

4. Use images

On Facebook, as everywhere, you need to succeed in capturing attention. For this, nothing beats a good image.

Posts with images receive twice as much engagement from users.

5. Ask for the type of engagement you want

Why make things complicated when you can keep it simple?
Do you want your post to be shared far and wide? Say so at the end of your post. Do you want people to like your page? Same principle.

Users readily accept this kind of request. The requested engagement (share, comment, like) generally doubles compared to a post with no explicit request.

To give a concrete example, one of our clients went from 0 shares per post to around ten per post simply by adding "Share this!" at the end of the message.

Be careful — use this tip sparingly. If you ask people every day to share your posts, you risk tiring your audience and driving them away. Only apply this practice to the posts you really want to make stand out in your digital communications.

6. Talk to your fans

Another simple tip that is nonetheless often overlooked: speak to your fans.

Ask them questions. "What do you think of…?", "What about you — this or that, agree or disagree?" and so on.

Prefer closed questions or simple questions. Some users might want to write an essay on the philosophy of the pearl oyster, but they are generally in the minority. On the other hand, many will respond if they simply have to choose between two options ("Chips or wedges?") or tag "a friend who might enjoy this activity". Your digital communications will be all the richer for it, and your Facebook page more lively.

7. Upload your videos directly to Facebook

To put a video on your Facebook page, there are two options: embed a YouTube video, or upload your video directly to your Facebook page.

It is the second option that you should prefer. Why? Because engagement on a video uploaded directly to Facebook is over 500% higher than for a shared YouTube video.

8. Avoid hashtags

This may come as a surprise. With Twitter and Instagram in particular making heavy use of hashtags, one might assume that Facebook follows the same path.

However, that is not the case. Hashtags have not caught on with Facebook, and it has actually been observed that a Facebook post with a hashtag performs worse than one without.

We hope these 8 tips will help you in your quest for engagement. It is impossible to predict which approach will work best or how long it will take to see a real effect — it depends far too much on your sector, your overall strategy, and your target audience. But by applying these few tips, your Facebook page will gain in effectiveness, as will your user-focused digital communications.

8 tips to increase engagement (likes, shares, etc.) on your Facebook posts!

1. Vary your post types

2. Keep it concise

3. Don't overwhelm your fans with posts

4. Use images

5. Ask for the type of engagement you want

6. Talk to your fans

7. Upload your videos directly to Facebook

8. Avoid hashtags

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