Businesses across the country are having to adapt their selling processes in order to corner the social media market and make sales during the national lockdown. Social selling is a key strategy and when done correctly it can help you get unlimited free leads which, with the right skills, can be converted into vital sales. One social media platform that lends itself to social selling is Facebook. However, it can be difficult to grow your brand awareness and establish a presence on the site. That’s why it is important to know how to grow your organic Facebook Engagement.
Tip one – It’s time to make friends
It makes sense that if you have more friends you will have more people viewing your posts. Before you start sending invites out, it is important to make sure that your profile is optimised to encourage people to accept.
In order to optimise your personal profile, you should ensure that you have your privacy set to public, an eye-catching header and profile picture and information about yourself or your company in your bio. It is also important that your post settings are changed to public, including the comments section.
Once this is done you can send out friends requests to your target audience. However, it is important that you do not send out too many. While there is no official guidance on what the request limit is on Facebook, it is recommended that you send no more than 30 per day, spread throughout the morning afternoon and evening.
Tip two – Only keep good friends
Now you have your friends, it’s time to remove any dead weight. Firstly, Facebook limits the amount of outstanding friends requests you can have to 1000. To ensure you don’t reach this limit, go through your pending requests every so often and delete any that are over a week old.
The next step you should be doing is unfriending any inactive accounts in your friend’s list. Having a number of friends who don’t engage with your content can have a limiting effect on the reach of your posts. You can remove inactive friends easily using a number of browser extensions. A quick online search should throw up a few useful tools.
Tip three – Interact with your audience
It may seem like just posting is enough to grab the attention of your audience but when you’re looking to grow your engagement you need to be doing more. Each day spend some time looking at the groups your audience engage in, comment on their posts and answer their questions. This will help you create meaningful relationships.
If you want Facebook to push your content to all of your friends and beyond, you need to be an active user. The algorithm that dictates what is seen and what isn’t often prefers the content of users who engage with others. At the end of the day, you get out what you put in.
Tip four – Don’t over-promote your business
While social media may be a great place to generate leads it has been designed to help people connect with other people, not necessarily businesses. If you saturate your friends feeds with business posts they will end up unfollowing and unfriending. It is important to find a balance between posting engaging content and promotion.
One way around this is to use links in your comments section, rather than on the post. If you can, create content that is relevant to your business but not necessarily selling anything. Then put some more business-related information in the comments with a link for more information. That way the post will still attract attention.
Tip five – Tailor your posts for Facebook Engagement
Too often we will see the same content churned out across social media platforms. While this may be the quickest way to get your message out there, it is not the most effective. Each platform favours different kinds of content, lengths of text and methods of posting.
Something that works particularly well on Facebook is including a call to action on your posts. For example, if you upload an image with a number of options on you can ask your audience to vote for the one they agree with by using the different like options, commenting or sharing. This will boost engagement.
Content shared from other sites should be optimised for use on Facebook. Articles and blogs need to be SEO friendly and feature eye-catching headings and imagery to encourage people to click through the link. With videos, it is best that these are uploaded directly to Facebook rather than shared from Youtube as the algorithm prefers native videos.
The result – Increased engagement!
If each of these tips is implemented then your content will start to perform better on Facebook, leading to more engagement and most importantly an increase in leads. Then it’s just down to your or your team to convert these into sales!
