Looking to increase Facebook engagement ASAP? These tips should help.

So, a lot of my clients use Facebook as their main social media platform to communicate with prospective clients. Many also often talk about how, in the light of the constant algorithm changes, it’s become trickier than ever to engage people.

Questions around what to post on Facebook, how to make your content really engaging, and how to not come off as a spammy sleazeball… I know you’ve got questions. I’ve gotchu.

I’ve decided to write this post to share some tips on how to increase Facebook engagement today, so it hopefully helps you reach more people and get more clients.

But first, some context:

If you’ve found yourself freaking out over the fact that Facebook made it harder than ever before for businesses to communicate with their audiences, you’re not alone.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg himself stated that:

“You’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard — it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.”

I mean, WTF, Zuck?! Where’s the love?!

Well, I mean I’m not really shocked and you can’t be either. This whole notion that we can advertise online for free is no longer accurate. Social media, particularly Facebook, has largely become a pay-to-play medium for most brands who want to see any real results.

Despite the algorithm changes, Facebook remains one of the main platforms for many coaches, experts, and service-based entrepreneurs simply because we get to form real, deep connections on here much more focused on the context and storytelling versus just pretty pictures (like Instagram). Although, I’ll say we’ve been loving LinkedIn lately too, but that’s a sidenote.

Anyway.

Let’s dig right into some stuff you can do quickly and hopefully tip the scale in your favor as much as you can, so you can continue using Facebook effectively to attract more leads, clients, and customers your way!

Table of Contents:

• What to post on Facebook
• Best time to post on Facebook
• Increase Facebook engagement with video
• How to use Facebook for maximum engagement
• How to use Facebook Groups for business
• Experiment with Facebook Messenger
• Don’t forget Facebook Advertising

And of course – If you dig this post, make sure to share it. We appreciate it! ❤

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What to post on Facebook

This is always the first question I get around how to increase Facebook engagement: What to post on Facebook to get people to engage with your stuff. Let’s dig into a few things to keep in mind so you can tip the scale in your favor.

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1. Steer towards the positive vs negative

Despite the fact that you might sometimes see shocking or disturbing content on Facebook, research shows that content that evokes a positive reaction actually performs better than negative.

In fact, Fraclr did a study and saw that there was a strong relationship between virality and positive emotions. See the graph below:

Additionally, Facebook has recently come out with a statement, aligned with their new algorithm, where they emphasized that they will be focused on giving more “juice” to meaningful interactions versus clickbait or other types of content.

They describe a “meaningful” interaction as one that is authentic, personal, and positive.

I mean, it makes sense. Facebook wants people to feel GOOD when they visit the platform. They want to stick to the reason why they started in the first place which was for personal connections.

People also want to feel like they’re a part of the conversation. They want to feel like you are talking with them versus at them.

“What works for me is to post a question once a week on my personal page like this ” One of women in my group had a great DATE and doesn’t know if she should PLAY IT COOL or OBSESS? She doesn’t really know what the middle ground is… Any ideas/thoughts for her? Guys, PLEASE weigh in!”.A question like that usually gets around 35 comments and at least 2 leads per week with zero ads spend to my Facebook group where I booked 4 $3K or higher coaching clients in the first 3 months of 2018.”

– Andi Forness, Online Dating Coach for Women, Austin, TX

Typical spammy business-only types of posts that clearly have an agenda don’t work the same because they either aren’t personal or authentic, OR they don’t evoke any feelings – positive or negative.

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2. Post epic content

If the only thing you’ve been posting on your Facebook are quotes with a single-line sentence, or typical questions just to get people to engage, it’s no surprise you have been seeing a decline in reach.

What used to work no longer does, as Facebook realized people were using these types of content to hack the increase Facebook engagement. So they made those posts get less reach. BUT, even if they did still get a good amount of reach, we’ve all seen it before.

We’ve seen people do this to the extent that we’ve become blind to it. It’s no longer fresh, relevant, and exciting to see an image with a quote on it (that’s SO Instagram circa 2016) or irrelevant questions (What’s your favorite color? WHO CARES!).

I did a video below that talks about the types of content you can share that works REALLY well on Facebook today.

Dig the video? Check out my YouTube Channel here.

There are five types of posts that work impeccably well today for coaches and service-based entrepreneurs to get AUTHENTIC engagement from people who are actually interested – versus just hitting “like” for no reason at all.

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3. Experiment with Facebook Stories

After the success of  Snapchat and Instagram Stories, Facebook introduced Stories to their platform too. It’s a bit confusing since they seem to have separate stories for Messenger AND the overall Facebook app, but I’ve seen the best impact from the overall Facebook Stories.

You can see them on your phone on the very top of the app…

… or you can even see them on desktop.

The cool thing about it is you can convert basically any post you share in the newsfeed into a Story, so it reaches a bit more people.

How many more? Well, that’s dependent on how many people you’re friends with (since only people you’re friends with get to see your posts), so this does not work for business pages as of right now (although they have begun adding this capability to Facebook groups and Events!)

I think there’s a huge opportunity here to amplify the impact and reach of your content by sharing them into Stories, especially since it only takes a few clicks.

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4. Repost your best content

A lot of people think that they have to keep coming up with brilliant content every single day in order to increase Facebook engagement and that you can’t repurpose or repost your old posts. If you’re not reposting your old stuff, you’re missing out!

Here are a few reasons why reposting is a great idea:

1. Most people don’t get to see all of your posts anyway, so by reposting later on you’re getting more people (possibly new fans) to see some of your best stuff. Yay for you!
2. You don’t have to work as hard creating new content every day or week, you can leverage what you’ve already created to keep getting people engaged with your stuff.
3. Most people don’t remember your old stuff anyway. And even if they did see it before, let’s be honest, no one is gonna be mad that they are reading the same post you published 6 months ago if it was really good. We need repetition to really have things sink in. Why do you think people watch the same movies over and over again?

Your Action Steps:

1. Look over the last year’s worth of posts in your profile, page, and group and look at the ones that got the best response
2. Copy and paste them into Evernote, Trello, or another document tool (or project management tool)
3. Remove any time-bound mentions, like any specific call-to-actions to particular programs or references to dates, etc.
4. Put them into a recycling or scheduling platform, such as Buffer, RecurPost, or another tool. Let them do the magic in reposting, or you can schedule when you want each post to be shared again.
5. Enjoy more engagement with your best content. Now no good content is going to waste!

As a rule of thumb though, I do recommend you wait at least a few months before reposting the same piece of content to the same channel so people that did see have the chance to forget it. I’d say 4-6 months should be enough time.

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Best time to post on Facebook

The next most common question is about the best time to post on Facebook to get the maximum engagement. The truth of the matter is, there is no “best” time. It really depends on your audience! My people might use Facebook differently than your people.

For example, since I talk to entrepreneurs, most of them are likely using Facebook during the day (since it’s often a part of their workday!) but if you are talking to career women, they are likely using it in the evenings, after work.

These are obviously just examples, not something to use and run with. Anyway, let’s go ahead and dig into these tips so you can increase Facebook engagement today.

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5. Post consistently and frequently enough

An important thing to know when the best time to post is by posting frequently and consistently enough to start noticing some patterns in engagement. I like to track all of the posts I share, including the day and time I post them, plus the engagement I get on each. From there, I get to see whether timing matters or if it’s really just topic relevant.

“I started adding fun and joke-like photos in among my shares of blog posts and other money-related lessons and my engagement skyrocketed for all of my posts, not just the fun posts.”

– Clarissa Wilson, Financial Strategist, Harrisburg, PA

“Consistently and frequently enough” might scare you if you’re not the best at creating epic content. Well, you don’t have to ONLY create epic content all the time. You can repurpose, OR you can create some engagement boosting, fun types of posts to sprinkle around. Often, the engagement you get from those posts will them carry to your biggest, more impactful and business related posts too.

Here are your Action Steps:

1. Come up with a schedule or plan – how often do you wish to post? Once per day? Less? More?
2. What are the types of posts you can share that are relevant for your audience?
3. What are some posts you can share that will drum up more engagement so it can spill over to your other posts?
4. Set the plan into action by scheduling the posts into a scheduler or posting them actively each day and start tracking the performance of your posts to start noticing patterns

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6. Test different times

Ok, but let’s talk more about the timing specifically. Obviously, if you post something in the middle of the night and your audience is usually sleeping at that time, you likely won’t see the results you are looking for.

Scheduling platforms have done their own research into this and came to a few conclusions based on overall user behavior.

Hootsuite found that the best times to post on Facebook is between 12pm and 3pm Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday; and Saturdays and Sundays from 12pm to 1pm.

Coschedule, on the other hand, compiled information from 20 different studies for their “best time to post” guide. They found that Sundays, Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays got more engagement than any other days and that 3pm posts will get you the most clicks but 1pm posts will get you the most engagement.

The best way to approach is though is by using your own data from your fan page to see when your audience is usually most likely to engage!

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Increase Facebook engagement with video

Whether you wanna admit it or not, we live in a world that’s dominated by video. I’m still one of the rare ones who love to read (and usually prefer it) but in an attention-hungry business world, we have to be able to entertain and hook people in other ways than just textually. Video, it is!

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7. Stream Live whenever you can

Livestreaming is all the rage, and it’s no surprise. As I said before, we want to feel like we’re a part of something, like we’re being talked with versus AT. Livestreaming allows people to feel like they are a part of the content creation process, plus they get to interact with their admired brand in real time which can be pretty exciting.

Facebook stated that “People spend more than 3x more time watching a Facebook Live video on average compared to a video that’s no longer live” and “people comment more than 10 times more on Facebook Live videos than on regular videos”.

On top of that, livestreaming can have an echo effect on your other content as well! Social Media Examiner noticed that when they went live more often, their other content received more exposure. It’s possible that when you go live, your fans are exposed to your brand even if they don’t watch the live video, and therefore may check out your other stuff.

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8. Experiment going live on Profile vs Page

The next most logical question most of my clients ask is WHERE do I go live? Profile? Fan page? Group? So many options. I’m about to simplify it for you and tell you what I usually do and why. I’ll also say that it is not necessarily the most “recommended” by Facebook. So use at your own risk.

First, let me share the pros and cons to each option…

Reasons to go live on your business fan page:

• PRO: You get to keep all your content in one business-related place, so organizationally it makes sense.
• PRO: You get to then retarget viewers of the video with ads (Facebook will create a custom audience based on people who have seen the video, which can be great for retargeting ads. More on that in another post).
• PRO: You can boost the video afterward to get even more views
• PRO: You get to play nice with Facebook terms and conditions (that’s always nice, haha).
• PRO: You get to keep your stuff public, so if someone shares you live or tags a friend, they will be able to see it and it has a potential to go viral.
• CON: However, if you have a tiny audience on the Facebook fan page, the likelihood of your live being seen or getting a good number of live viewers is pretty slim.

Reasons to go live on your Facebook personal profile:

• PRO: Facebook’s newsfeed favors personal accounts over business pages, so your livestream is more likely to get seen by people than it would be by a fan page.
• PRO: You get to show up on the top of the Stories section of Facebook with a red circle around you, calling attention to the fact you’re live – meaning more people will see you live!
• PRO: You might often show up as a notification for folks who are following you or friends with you on Facebook, making it even easier to get more viewers.
• CON: If you are selling something and sharing links to business related stuff, that’s not playing nice with Facebook’s T&C.
• CON: If you are not friends on Facebook with prospective clients, this strategy makes no sense for you. You have to be willing to use your personal profile as a networking tool.
• CON: You are not utilizing Facebook’s ability to create a custom audience out of the live viewers as you would if you did it on a fan page since Facebook can only run ads to business page posts, not personal profile posts.
• CON: You can’t boost the post to get more views easily.
• CON: If you don’t make the privacy as “public”, your live can only be seen by friends and won’t be able to go viral as easily.

Reasons to go live in your free Facebook group:

• PRO: You get to keep your lives special and organized only for your audience within the group.
• PRO: You create exclusive content people will want to watch and therefore be a part of the group.
• CON: If your group is small, you are limiting the number of people who get to see the live to only those in the group, which means you cannot go viral at all since no one can share your post or live outside of the group.
• CON: If your group is small, you likely won’t get any live viewers which might make it more challenging to be engaging.
• CON: You don’t get to create a custom audience from the livestream that was posted in a group to then retarget the viewers with ads.

Personally, I go live on my personal profile about 90% of the time. I’ll go live only if I am doing some kind of a pre-scheduled event or when I know I will want to run ads to the video later on. Otherwise, for just organic reach and content, I prefer to have Facebook give me the boost by sharing it with my friends (since I am using my Facebook profile mostly as a networking tool).

This is an example of a business topic live I did on my profile. It’s actually NOT against Facebook’s T&C because I am not selling anything, not including any links, and just talking about the topic versus making it promote-y. So, there are ways around the rules 😉

Experiment with using both and see your response. If you usually go live on your business page, try your profile. Or vice versa.

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9. Schedule livestreams ahead of time

What’s the best way to make sure more people attend your livestream? Well, simple. You tell them ahead of time when it’s happening and what to expect. If we do it for webinars, why wouldn’t we do it for livestreams?

There are two ways to schedule your lives. The first deals with the Facebook API and allows your livestream to actually be posted, people to subscribe, and then it refreshes with the actual live once it’s live.

You can do this with something like Wirecast, OBS Studio, or Ecamm Live.

Facebook states that:

“Scheduling a live video makes it easier to build anticipation and buzz with your audience before your broadcast begins, so you can start strong with an audience already assembled.

When you schedule a live video, an announcement post will be published to News Feed letting your fans on Facebook know that the broadcast is coming. People who see the post can opt-in to receive a one-time reminder notification that will alert them shortly before your broadcast begins.

Your fans can then join a pre-broadcast lobby directly before the live video starts, where they can connect and interact with other viewers.

“Combining prescheduled Facebook Live videos with Messenger Bots allowed us to take one video to a reach of 1 Million organically.”

– Molly Mahoney, Founder: The Prepared Performer, Orange, California

You can schedule a live broadcast up to one week in advance, and people can join your lobby three minutes before your broadcast begins. Once you’ve scheduled a live video, you will be able to share a link to the broadcast or embed it in other places, such as websites or blogs.”

The second way to schedule is a combination.

You can create a Facebook event and tell people about the livestream as if it’s an event happening (cause it kind of is!). Also, you can post on your account reminding people when you’re about to go live.

Example: I was going live on my business fan page, but wanted to tell/remind my Facebook friends about it, too.

My recommendation is to do a mix of both. Tell people you’re going live and then have them subscribe to the API posted livestream on your page.

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10. Do a solid job with your videos

While yes, videos are important, they are also super easy to do nowadays. All you need is a phone and a willingness to get on camera. Actually, sometimes you don’t even have to do that – you can just do slides and boom. So needless to say, with the rise of video, there’s also been a rise of crappy video.

What do I mean by crappy video? Well, videos that are hard to watch:

• The presenter is really boring, monotonous, slow speaking, or clearly terrified of saying a word
• The quality of the video is really poor where it’s super grainy and you can barely see anything
• The quality of the audio sucks, where it keeps popping or has a lot of ambient noise making it hard to hear

Now, if you’re dealing with serious visibility issues but want to get on camera, this doesn’t help. But no worries! Practice makes perfect and the more you do it, the better you will become. But the keyword here is — practice.

You can’t just will yourself to be super good and engaging, we’ve all had our fair share of boring, lame, or embarrassing videos. They’re like a rite of passage. And guess what? None of us died.

But we did all get better. Because we kept going.

You’ll be just fine.

Now, to really stand out you can take a few extra steps to make your videos extra good:

• Have a good camera, like an iPhone or another good camera for livestreaming, OR using a DSLR (I use this for YouTube) or another professional-ish camera (I use this for YouTube when I travel) for produced video.
• Have great lighting. Honestly, this is probably the #1 key to success with good quality video. Just make sure your lighting is solid. Either do your video near a window with the camera pointing away from the window and towards you or invest in a Diva Light.
• Amp yourself up and just have fun with it, it’s not that serious. The more you’re nervous, the more you’ll look awkward, so just say screw it and just talk. You can get better and better from there. Don’t overthink it.

Need inspiration? Here’s a list of some awesome female entrepreneurs who are crushing it with their videos.

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11. Include captions on videos if possible

Now, here are two important stats to remember:

Did you know that an estimated 85% of video on Facebook is watched without sound? (source) But, did you also know that internal data collected by the social network showed that 76% of video ads need sound to be understood? (source)

Does this mean you can scrap audio? Nope. Cause you still need it. So how do we engage people? Well, the magic number happens at the 3-second mark. I people make it past the 3-seconds, they are significantly more likely to watch for another 10 second and then from there to continue watching.

“We know that 65% of people who watch the first three seconds of a video will watch for at least ten seconds and 45% continue watching for thirty seconds,” said Facebook.

So, how do we get people to watch? Well, your video HAS to engage people without sound, at least in the beginning. (Cause ideally, if it looks interesting, people will click on the video to listen to the sound too once it’s done its job in engaging them).

A great way to do this is by including closed captioning!

In fact, Facebook states that including closed captions boosts the average view time of a video by 12%.

Take the steps to add captions to your videos:

Head over to your video library, select the video you want to edit and click on “Captions.” If your page has the feature activated, the “Generate” button should be right there. Keep in mind, these will be auto-generated so most likely will be anywhere from 40-70% accurate. You’ll have to go in to clean them up after.

You can also get a video transcribed into a closed caption file that you can then upload to the video by using a service like Rev.com. This is a great option for longer videos since Facebook won’t auto-generate captions for videos that are longer than 10 minutes.

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How to use Facebook for maximum engagement

Did you know there are very specific things you can do to ensure maximium engagement and tip the scale in your favor? Little tiny hacks or tricks you can do that don’t require a ton of extra effort but can pay off in a big way. Here they are…

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12.Remind followers to put notifications on

This is a super simple thing to ensure more people see (and therefore, can engage with) your posts. You’ve gotta remind them to put their notifications on!

The truth is, if you have a Facebook business page, a vast majority of your followers are not seeing your posts. Sad but true.

You can remedy this by getting as many of your followers as possible to enable notifications by clicking on the button next to “Like” on your fan page and then making sure “See First” is selected.

This way, anytime you go live or post something new, your audience will be notified of it and can check it out.

You can do the same for your Facebook group. When people first join a new group, notifications are enabled by default but they usually turn them off after being bombarded for a while.

Encourage people to turn their notifications on, at least for friends (that’s one of the options for groups). Then, friend them on Facebook to ensure they do get your notifications and they don’t just forget your group exists. (It happens!)

This is a great way to increase Facebook engagement.

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13. Share from page to profile and group (and beyond)

Another simple hack you can do today is to share your big amazing content from one place into another. A typical example of this would be sharing your livestream you did on your fan page onto your personal profile or a group.

Doing this will allow more folks to see your post and therefore increase the engagement on it as well, as a whole. This is particularly good for livestreaming or videos since Facebook then creates a custom audience. If you want to target your Facebook group members, just share your already-published video from your fan page into a group, and anyone who watches a few seconds of it, can then be retargeted with ads.

Another tip, you can also share your posts (especially videos) into OTHER platforms outside of Facebook!

“I decided to start cross-posting my Facebook videos to Twitter and LinkedIn, so when they click on it, they’re taken to my Facebook page and can engage there. I’ve noticed the views increase 3 fold when I did this.”

– Vickie Gould, Law of Attraction/ Book Coach, Michigan

Now I have to warn you: don’t overdo this.

You don’t want to be that annoying person that just shares her stuff into other people’s groups without any context or sharing and disappearing (I call it “drive-by promo”). That’s an easy way to get either banned from a group or totally disengaging your audience.

Be selective. Pick the best, most impactful content and then share that with your other audiences.

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14. Reply to people’s comments (but not immediately)

Shhh, I almost don’t wanna tell you about this one, but I love you so I will. This is one of my favorite hacks because it works soo well! The way Facebook works is it pushes well-performing content to more people.

So, you publish a post. A few people see it.

If no one clicks on it or engages with it, it’s likely to fall into the abyss never to be seen again in the newsfeed (unless someone does engage).

If, however, someone from that small initial group does see it, and they do engage with it, that signifies to Facebook that your post might be worth sharing to more folks. And so the reach grows.

And with the reach? So does engagement.

Now, what happens is after a while, people stop commenting. From there, Facebook notices that and stops showing the post to more people. It ends there unless someone else comments or likes the post to show Facebook, again, that this stuff is good. So they will push it back into the newsfeed.

The hack? Comment on your own posts, replying to folks who are commenting on the post. BUT don’t do it immediately. Wait a few hours.

This way, Facebook might have already stopped showing it in the newsfeed and it likely got the most organic engagement it could from the first push… then you come in, and initiate the second push by replying to some of these comments.

Boom! Pushes the post back into the news feed. It’s freaking brilliant.

This is how you can keep your post relevant and in the news feed for longer than just a few hours – and often into several days or weeks! (Yes, it has happened!) It’s another great way to increase Facebook engagement.

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15. Like your own posts

Well, this goes similarly to the previous point about replying to people’s comments. But, what if there are no comments to reply to on your post? well, it’s possible your post either didn’t have a clear reason for people to comment or maybe it wasn’t very good, but you can try to give it a bit of extra juice into the newsfeed by liking it yourself.

For some strange reason, some people are afraid of liking their own post, thinking they’re gonna look like a tool. Well, guess what? If you don’t love what you’re posting anyway, you’ve gotta change your stuff up!

You should be proud of liking your stuff, girlfriend. Own it!

And if you feel awkward… well… where is that showing up in your life? Why aren’t you owning up to your brilliance and your visibility? (hehehe, ok I’m taking my coach hat off… for now)

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16. Create (or Join) Engagement Boosting Groups

This is a very similar strategy that people do on Instagram. They call those Instagram pods.

Apparently, you can do them on Facebook too, so that’s pretty fun. The idea is going off of what we have already said before – giving your posts more juice to land and stay in the newsfeed. Except instead of just you being the one to engage with the comments and likes, you can recruit your friends to do it with you.

“I’m a part of a small group of like-minded business owners who have agreed to help boost visibility on each other’s content by adding authentic comments immediately after posting. We all follow each other’s work and can contribute to the conversation in a meaningful way. While this sounds spammy, but it’s actually not as we’d all comment on each other’s stuff either way. This tactic just ensures that comments occur more quickly after posting.”

– Lauren Pawell, Founder + Owner, Denver, CO

Personally, anytime I have a post I REALLY want more of my people to see (especially when I post it on my profile or Facebook group, where I can’t boost it with ads) I will text some of my business besties and ask them to comment on the post as a favor.

This often gets the ball rolling.

Your Action Steps:

• Ask yourself: Who are some friends you can form a “pod” to help each other out?
• Reach out to these friends and explain the strategy to them
• Create a group Facebook message and you can message each other in the chat anytime you feel like you’d like your post to get a bit of extra love
• If you don’t have any business friends you can do this with, no problem. Make some business friends! A great way to do this is by joining relevant Facebook groups (like mine!) or high-level masterminds or group programs (like my Impact Incubator!).

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How to use Facebook Groups for business

We’ve mentioned them a few times throughout this post already… Facebook groups are a part of the whole Facebook ecosystem and they can be an effective way to engage your audience and have them feel like they’re a part of a community (versus just being talked AT by a faceless brand).

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17. Create a free Facebook group around a topic or audience type

One of the best guys out there for teaching Facebook groups is my buddy, Arne Giske (we had him on the podcast recently and he dropped some real gold).

What Arne recommends is NOT creating a Facebook group around YOU or your brand, especially if your goal is to GROW your audience. Instead, create a group focused on a topic or audience type.

For example, instead of naming your group something like “Sara’s awesome audience” you could name it “Passionate Pet Owners” if, for example, your ideal audience are pet owners.

This allows for a stranger to potentially see your group in their Suggested Groups and want to join if they identify with the name.

If you already have a group, ask yourself:

• How can you make it more friendly towards strangers, not just current audience members?
• Do you need to rename it? Maybe you need to create a new cover photo to makes it friendlier to strangers?

From there, you can create a process to approval that asks for people’s email address, which basically means you’d be creating a “group funnel” where you grow your list while growing your group.

Arne created a software that takes the lead generation process off your hands and saves you hours of time, it’s called GroupFunnels and it’s literally the only thing that does this (and it’s pretty amazing and a must-have for any group owner).

Get GroupFunnels and turn your group into a lead gen funnel right here.

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18. You have to get creative with engaging your community

This is a great tip not just for groups, but for any of your channels. Nowadays, we don’t want brands to just talk “at” us, we want to feel like we’re a part of a community, we want to feel like we belong. You’ll have to get creative to make sure your content matches that desire.

“When I started treating my Facebook Page like a community atmosphere, our engagement on the small 5,000 follower Page matched (and at times, exceeded) audiences of half a million in the same niche. ”

– Amanda Bond, The Ad Strategist, Toronto, ON

What can you do to make people feel more welcome?

Sometimes it will come down to tagging members individually in posts you think they would benefit from seeing. Other times, it’s individually welcoming people into a group. And yet other times, it’ll be creating a clear reason and benefit to being in the group – will they get special deals, offers, or maybe trainings you don’t share publicly?

Maybe you’ll provide group coaching calls for free within the group delivered as a Facebook live? Maybe it’s something else?

“I batch create a ton of beautifully designed daily prompts and pre-schedule them in my group to ensure my peeps consistently hear from me. This has lead to 4 calls booked in two weeks from a brand new Facebook group.”

– Sharell Weeams, Lead Generation Strategist, Dallas, TX

Whatever you choose, make sure you keep your content as authentic as possible. First sight into something that is totally automated and lacking that personal touch, your members will notice and go somewhere where they feel more welcome.

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18. Prune your groups’ members list

Deleting people toincrease Facebook engagement? WTF?

This one goes against common knowledge and what most entrepreneurs try to do. I’ve talked about pruning my email list before (check out this video below) and the importance of it…

But what about Facebook groups?

Well, here’s the thing. It’s been shown that if you have a huge Facebook group, but no one engages with your stuff in the group, your overall engagement AND REACH of the posts will also plummet.

It seems that Facebook is looking at the percentage in terms of how many people are in the group vs how many of them engage to determine whether the group’s content should be pushed out into the news feed.

Remember, a lot of people belong to dozens of groups which means there is a lot of competition for the newsfeed space.

How will Facebook know which content to push out in front of more people? Well, they want the experience to be enjoyable and positive for folks. So, if more people engage within a group, it’s likely that they enjoy that content.

Here’s what you can do:

1. Only accept pre-qualified members: Create a few questions people need to answer in order to join the group. This way you are pre-qualifying people before joining and only accepting those who: a) follow directions and listen to guidelines, which is illustrated by filling out the quick form, and b) pre-qualify themselves based on specific criteria. For example, my Facebook group is only for impact-driven coaches and experts. If you are not a coach or expert with an existing business, you will not be accepted in the group.
2. Remove unengaged members: Every few months, go through the group members and remove those who never engage at all. There isn’t a simple way to do this right now unfortunately, but you can simply post a few pieces of content every so often to encourage people to like the post otherwise they might be removed if they have never engaged with anything in the past. You could do this every six months or once per year.

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19. Experiment with “paid” groups versus just free

This is more of an advanced strategy, but if you already have a ton of members in your free group (or within your email list), a cool thing you can move into next is creating a “paid” group.

Now, to be clear this isn’t a Facebook group that people pay for (which would be against T&C) HOWEVER this can be a group your paying members get access to as a BONUS to something else they buy.

The reason this can work quite well is that people who have more skin the game (by buying one of your products) are more likely to engage, and therefore your content will likely get seen by a higher percentage of people.

How to do it:

A simple way you can do this is by creating an exclusive Facebook group for ALL of your paying customers.

I did that for 2 years when I was focusing on my personal brand and had around 600 members in there. It was fun. Eventually, I got bored and decided to archive it because I struggled with keeping things separate from my free group. But it was good while it lasted.

Another thing you can do is create an exclusive group for ONE of your programs. This keeps the conversation focused and organized, but unless you have a good number of members, it might be mostly quiet.

Lastly, you can create a membership site which provides access to the group as a bonus. Same thing as before, this group can be very engaged but also steer towards quieter unless you’re great at nurturing and you have a good base number of members already in it.

Most of my clients have (or want to create) membership sites so if you wanna talk about that, I’m happy to chat and see how we can grow it.

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Experiment with Facebook Messenger

I bet you’ve heard people talk about Facebook messenger before and there’s a good reason for it. Using messenger strategically can be a great way to boost your performance on posts you share on your pages.

Now, before I move on, I want to caution you: There are many people who are abandoning growing their email list and replacing that with growing their messenger list. This is not a smart move.

Your email list should still be a top priority as it is the only asset you truly own.

Messenger lists could go away tomorrow if Facebook says so. So, while I like using messenger as an option, make sure you are being smart with it, and don’t put all of your eggs into the messenger basket.

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20. Invite your followers to send you messages

So here’s how this works: As soon as someone sends your business fan page a message, you can then technically message them from there and send them broadcasts. There are specific limitations on that so you don’t become a spammer, but that’s basically how it works.

I recommend using an external 3rd party tool for managing and growing your messenger list to keep things easy, otherwise, you might struggle. My tool of choice is ManyChat (and it’s what most people recommend as well).

From there, there are many ways for your followers to send you messages.

You can put pop-up boxes on your website, you can encourage them ON facebook, you can do a ton of different things that I won’t be getting into within this article. I might in the future though.

Your next step:

Ask people to send you a message on your business page in order to get something. People won’t do it for no reason. So give them something, an incentive, to make the action. Here are some of your options.

• Option 1: Take your most popular lead magnet, and instead of asking people for email, replace the button with a “send to messenger” button so people have to contact you there to get the optin.
• Option 2: Instead of changing your landing page, change the thank you page and include the next step for new leads: sending to messenger (and this will allow them to receive something extra special outside of just the lead magnet as promised).
• Option 3: Ask people to comment on your post on Facebook with a specific keyword and when they do, you will automatically message them with the next steps. This can be done with ManyChat’s “comment” growth tool. It’s one of my favorite ways to grow the messenger list since it stays within Facebook.

I could go on and on, but this should be enough for you to get started.

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21. Send reminders to subscribers on messenger

Here’s the cool thing… once you’ve gotten some folks on your messenger list, you can then message them so you can then increase Facebook engagement overall.

You can send people reminders of when you’re going live, or about new good posts you’ve just shared.

Let’s say you spend an hour putting together content for a massively epic livestream and then go live but didn’t get a ton of views. Tell your subscribers to go check it out! This results in more views and more engagement – yay!

Or anytime you are PLANNING on going live, just tell your people ahead of time. Same thing we discussed in one of the points above, but you are basically guaranteeing people will see your invitation to join the livestream since messenger chats have like a 98% open rate.

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22. Automate the interaction with bots

And now here’s the beauty of all beauties… it’s like creating nurture sequences but for the messenger list. And this means you can include past videos, livestreams, and posts you’ve made on your fan page (or Facebook group), put them into the bot sequence and continue to send traffic to them way after they’ve been published. Keeping them alive!

One of my private clients, Jenna Faye, founder of Sacred SHE Sisterhood, has a really cool coaching bot sequence in place for her business for new subscribers. (you can check it out right here)

In it, each subscriber goes through a series of messages to get nurtured, indoctrinated and introduced to various offers, lead magnets, and videos throughout.

The bot funnel was developed by Austin Witte from Blur Media.

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Don’t forget Facebook Advertising 

Obviously (since I also run a small agency where we do this for clients) this is one of my favorite boosts to your engagement. If you try all the things organically but still want more reach, just pay for it.

You’re in business after all, there are investments that need to be made. This is one of my favorite ones 🤗

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23. Boost your best-performing posts and videos

This is the easiest thing you can do to increase Facebook engagement – just boost your well-performing posts on your fan page.

The keyword here being “well-performing.” A boring post won’t get a good result even if you throw a bunch of money at it (unless you don’t care about spending tons of money per engagement).

So, you post a video or make a text post… you get some engagement. You can then boost it to get more folks to see it.

Now, I will say that I don’t usually recommend boosting posts unless you have a bigger strategy as to why you’re doing it since more engagement doesn’t always usually equate to leads or sales and there are better ways for you to spend your ad budget that actually will result in quicker tangible growth.

However, if you have a strategy behind why you’re boosting the posts – go for it. (I talk about that in this masterclass)

“When I have a post, especially a video or Facebook Live that I think is going to do really well, I ‘boost’ it to people already in my community FIRST because they already know me and are way more likely to comment and share. Once I’ve received some engagement, I then move to boosting the post to a cold audience to reach new people and continue the conversation with new potential subscribers and customers. By adding that first step of boosting to a warm audience first, I started seeing more than double the amount of engagement I was getting previously.”

– Amber Rose Thomas

One of my former mastermind clients did a livestream that got a good number of views organically – more than usual – so we had her boost the ad… in less than a few days she racked up 100,000 views for just a few bucks.

This worked so well because she used a video that already got a lot of engagement naturally and the ad budget simply boosted it. So, use it on stuff that’s already working!

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24. Create custom audiences to market your stuff to first

Social proof builds engagement. Let me illustrate this, let’s say someone who doesn’t know you sees two ads/posts from you. One of these posts has no engagement on it. The other has some engagement and friendly comments saying how epic you are. Which of the posts is this person more likely to sign up for? The second, obviously.

Having social proof on your posts – even in as simple of a form as likes and comments – increases the likelihood that other people will also engage with your stuff. They will also see you more favorably because they have been pre-framed well especially if there were some great comments on the post already that the person read.

You can do this by running simple remarketing ads.

If you are using the Facebook pixel on your website, you can then run ads to those particular people who have either visited your entire website or specific pages on the website. Someone who already knows you is more likely to engage with your stuff, so this can be a great way to get the engagement started on a post.

The other cool thing is you can run ads to people who already engage with your content on Facebook! The most popular way to do this is by targeting people who have seen your videos or livestreams uploaded to Facebook. You can target people who either saw the entire video OR saw just a portion of it, and anything in between. It’s really neat.

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25. The longer you wait to run ads, the harder it’ll be

Here’s a hard truth: If you wait to run ads until you’re “ready” you might be faced with pretty expensive ads. Facebook advertising is probably the easiest platform to run ads on, and because of this many people are trying their hand at advertising. And the more people run ads, the pricier it becomes to run them.

But it’s not so bad yet! (here’s a screenshot from one of our clients within our Kamila Social agency)

(Pssst.. If you need help, check out our {AD}mazing Facebook Ads course from Kamila Social all about running high-converting Facebook Ads)

If you aren’t ready to run ads yet, get yourself as ready as you can be ASAP and capitalize on this opportunity while it’s still hot.

If you haven’t run ads before, here’s what I recommend doing:

1. Come up with a solid lead magnet idea and develop it (here’s a checklist for creating super-irresistible lead magnets)
2. Create an effective conversion-focused landing page and thank you page
3. Sync them up with your email autoresponder
4. Create an ad for the lead magnet
5. Run the ad to cold traffic

I always start out with just a simple lead magnet, making it as specific and irresistible as possible, so you can get the leads for the lowest cost as possible. I talk about that much more in other resources so that’s all I’ll say for now.

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So, there you have it!

Here are the 25 ways to increase Facebook engagement today (or quickly, anyway) so you can make your Facebook marketing super epic and magical.

If you found this post helpful, I’d love for you to share it. Just click on the Facebook button below to share. <3

I wish you all the content and message spreading in the world!

xoxo

 

 

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