How to Increase your Engagement on Facebook and Instagram

Apr 26

Facebook and Instagram are the two most used social media platforms for businesses and consumers. This means that if your business is not currently on one or both of these platforms, (read our blog about what social media platform suits your business here) then you are missing out on interacting with your customers and building your community and brand awareness.

Both Facebook and Instagram work off algorithms that determine who and how many people see your posts. Your posts are shown to a small percentage of your followers and if your engagement is high from these viewers, then it will be shown to another percentage of your followers and so on.

It can be hard to get increased engagement on your posts so we have a few tips to help you in your future posts on both social media platforms.

Find your best time to post

If you have a business page on both Facebook and Instagram you have access to insights and analytics that tell you your best time to post based on when your followers are most active the platform. Scheduling your posts on Facebook or a third party service such as Hootsuite (allows Instagram scheduling also) will help you to take full advantage of the best time to post which will in turn increase your engagement.

Ask a question or add a CTA in your captions

Your captions are an important part of your posts that help to explain your photo or video as well as provide information or context to a story or situation. Adding in a question at the end of the caption will prompt followers to interact with your post by commenting in response.

A Call To Action (CTA) is also a prompt for your follower to either click on a link to your website on a specific product to get more information or to purchase your product, read a blog post on your website or even download a free ebook you have created.

Utilise Stories

Stories are available on both Facebook and Instagram and are a great way to interact with your followers and potential customers. Stories allow you to be in the moment and post about a new product that has just arrived in-store, an event is on that your business is sponsoring or a BTS of what happens in the office etc.

Stories allow you to tag other accounts, add hashtags and also add a location which can help you be seen by more people than just your followers. You have just added a new post on Instagram, add it to your story where people can click on the picture leading straight to your photo to like and comment.

Use Video Live

Video Live is also a great way to interact more with your followers. A very useful feature on both platforms that informs your followers that you are live through a notification allowing them to click straight through to your video. Engaging live videos will have your followers sticking around and watching for longer.

Interact with other posts and accounts in your area/niche

Following, liking and commenting on other posts and accounts in your area or niche is a great way for others who follow these accounts to see and click through to your page. It can also help these accounts to interact with you pages which their followers will see, especially if they are tagging you.

Be consistent with posting

Coming up with a schedule for posting is one of the most important elements to show consistency and have your posts shown to your current and potential followers. Spend a few hours to come up with a months worth of content that can be posted on Facebook and Instagram (they can overlap but change up your captions to suit each platform) and work out how many days a week suit your business and your team for posting.

Again remember services like Hootsuite who allow you to schedule in your posts in advance so you do not have to post each day over two platforms. Once you have scheduled in 2 weeks to a month in advance you will find it so much easier to continue creating content and to add more time to stories and live videos.

Reply to comments and speak with your community

Replying to comments and engaging with your community and followers is not only important for increasing engagement, it will also help you to build trust with them. Building trust in your brand and your business is extremely important as once you have this, that person will stick by you, be your best customer and tell all of their friends about you.

It also helps you to figure out what they want more of, what they don’t like, what their hobbies are and so much more that will influence your future content, posts and direction of the business.

Now it’s time to go ahead and implement the above tips into your social media strategy and plan. Remember to have fun with it and don’t be afraid to ask your followers questions, they will love to be involved.

If you are interested in talking more with us on social media planning and strategy please get in contact here.

Cristy Houghton

Cristy's unique career has taken her from country NSW to the city lights of Clarendon Street South Melbourne and back again. With an early career in radio as a copywriter and creative strategist, she is now a Jill of all trades as a graphic designer, website builder, blog writer, video editor, social media manager, marketing strategist and more.

In fact, give her any task and this chick will figure out how to do it! Go on, we dare you!

No, really, we DARE you!!

Cristy has won two Australian Commercial Radio Awards (ACRAs) for Best Ad and Best Sales Promotion, and even has an 'Employee of the Year' certificate with her name on it.

Cristy and her husband James have traveled extensively through Russia, China and South East Asia, and have two fur-babies, Sooty (cat) and Panda (puppy). Cristy loves drinking coffee, meeting people to drink coffee, coffee tasting and coffee flavoured cocktails. She also enjoys road trips, TED Talks and watching cat videos on youtube.

http://www.embarketing.com.au