A while back I wrote an article discussing the benefits of having a Facebook page as a way to increase exposure for your therapy or holistic business.
This article focuses on the importance of engagement on Facebook.
What is Engagement?
Engagement refers to the act of “liking” “commenting on” and “sharing” other people’s posts on Facebook.
Engagement is a two-way process–you need to both engage with other’s posts on Facebook as well as get your followers to engage with your posts. The focus of this article is on how to get more of your followers to engage with your posts.
Why Engagement is Important
Facebook uses an algorithm to determine which of your followers see your posts in their news feeds. Increasingly, Facebook is showing fewer and fewer of your posts to follows. In order for your posts to reach more of your followers, your followers need to engage with your posts. If they don’t, your posts won’t show up in their newsfeeds. Further, social media engagement in general is factored into search engine rankings.
3 Ways to Increase Engagement
There are many things you can do to encourage people to engage with your posts. 3 of these are described below.
1. Use Images
Image posts everywhere on Facebook, and for good reason. One recent study showed that images get 53% more likes, 104% more comments, and 84% more click-throughs to a website.
Your images should be relevant and enticing to your target audience. Take advantage of free photo sites like The Open Photo Project or 123RF.com. Better yet, take your own photos and share them.
Add an extra touch to your photos before posting, by taking advantage of free photo editing software like Pic Monkey. Pic Monkey has some cool options to add a border, change the hues, or add a text overlay. It quickly turns your photo into one that can captivate users, encouraging more engagement for your Facebook page.
You can also use Canva, an image creation tool that allows you to easily create posts with a graphic. Canva is easy to use and even has design tutorials. As Canva states on their website, “Canva enables anyone to become a designer.”
2. Get Crafty with Question Posts
Question posts can be a great way to get a conversation going. If you post something like, “On my way to a therapy conference,” you might include a question at the end. This could be something simple like, “What are you doing today?
If you have a blog, you could ask your fans what type of articles they would like to see you write. Alternatively, if you’re a nutritionist, a question post might be ‘How many servings of fruit and vegetables do you have each day?” Which ones are your favorites?’ This question can then be accompanied with a picture of fruits and/or vegetables.
3. Post Frequently
In addition to the role that Facebook’s algorithm plays in the number of people who see your posts, the lifespan of a post on Facebook is about 3 hours. This means that even when your posts appear in your followers’ news feeds, your followers will need to be on Facebook within a few hours of when you post your updates or they likely won’t see your posts.
For example, if you post at 8 am and 5% of your followers don’t check their Facebook page until their lunch break at Noon, they most likely will have missed seeing your post. This is especially true if your followers have liked multiple pages or have a lot of Facebook friends.
You can overcome both of these obstacles by posting at least 2-3 engaging Facebook posts throughout the day at different times. You then will reach more people and increase the chances that more of these people will engage with you.
Getting more likes on Facebook can seem daunting, especially when you’re not getting as many as you would like for the effort you put out. Rather than letting this discourage you, look to see what you can do to improve your strategy. Perhaps your posts are not what your followers want to see, maybe you’re posting at times when your audience is not online, or maybe you are not using enough interesting images.
The point is that there are many ways that you can increase your engagement for your therapy or healing practice; it just takes some effort, strategy, and time.
Have you found any strategies that increase engagement on Facebook? Please post your comments below in the comments section.
I discuss online marketing in my Marketing Plan Mini-Camp Course.
A great post Juliet 🙂