Low Facebook Page Engagement Rate? Here Are 12 Steps To Fix It

If you’re unhappy with your engagement rate or simply want to do even better, here’s some things you should consider when planning your content and deciding on your posting strategy

You shouldn’t just post sales pitches. Most people ignore those. Consider if what you post is relevant to your audience. Is it useful to them? Is it educational? Is it funny? You need to know your audience, know what questions they want answered and what needs they have.. Make sure your content helps them out, educates them, entertains them and makes them want to share it with their friends. Without posting quality content that your audience wants, all the rest of the advice below will not help you too much.

If you’ve built your page by inviting a lot of company employees or if you’ve got all your family and friends to like your page, the quality of those page likes might not be very high. You may have attracted the wrong kind of audience as they might not be interested in the content you are producing. Luckily for you, you can use post targeting, (something that I will go into later in this post), in order to restrict the posts to those people that are actually in the target audience of your content. Do remember this when promoting your page too. It’s not about increasing your page likes at any cost, it’s about reaching out to targeted people who are actually interested in what you do.

In our Facebook page posting frequency study we’ve seen that there can be large differences in reach and engagement numbers depending on how frequently pages post new content. We actually discovered that posting less frequently can result in more reach and engagement per post. Pages that posted every second day or even less got the highest engagement. You should look into how posting frequency affects your engagement too before deciding your strategy.

One way to boost the number of people you reach organically with your content is by posting on the days the majority of your audience is on Facebook. Do take a look at which days your fans are online? You may find that all the days are equally popular, but you may also find that there are certain days that are more popular than others. You could go even further and look at what days of the week most of your audience engaged with your past content.

From looking at days of the week you can also dig deeper and look at hours of the day and how many of your page likes are on Facebook at different times of the day. Is your audience mostly online on their morning commute? Maybe in working hours only? Or in evenings when they’re relaxing after a day at work? You could also consider the times of the day that your content received the most positive reaction in the past.. The lifetime of a Facebook post is not too long so you do want to post during hours when the majority of your audience is online in order to create the biggest impact.

In our Facebook study we have seen that there are large swings between the different post type formats and how many people they reach and engage on average. In our latest study we’ve identified that videos get the most engagement by engaging almost 26% of people reached. Plain status updates engaged less than 5% on the other hand. How does your page perform in regards to post formats? Do take a look at our Facebook Analyser to find out or for even more details take a look at the “Average Content Performance” chart in your Locowise account.

You can be narrower in your targeting by using options such as interest targeting. Use the “Set a News Feed audience for this post” feature when posting a new content piece. This will segment your audience and target by gender, relationship status, educational status, age, location, language and interests. You could even set the post end date which will remove posts that are out of date from the newsfeeds. These targeting options may restrict your post reach but will show your post to more people that are interested in the actual topic that you are covering, which will boost your engagement rate.

There are a lot of questions to consider with regards to the way the copy of the post is written. Should you have any text at all? Should you keep it short or go long? Should you be funny? Or conversational? Or professional? Here it’s important to know as much as possible about your audience, who they are, and what they want. Take some time to analyse that and test your way to the optimal copy strategy.

Facebook is a very visual medium so using imagery can give your posts an engagement boost. How do you use images well? First of all make sure you use the optimal image size. Also do make sure to use a high quality image that looks well in all news feeds – desktop and mobile. Similar to the point about copy above, you need to think about your audience and who they are to identify what type of imagery you should use.

Videos are in vogue on Facebook as seen by our studies that show videos gaining the highest organic reach and engagement. Videos on Facebook auto play with no sound as people scroll through their news feeds. This means that your video needs to be strong from the first moment and it needs to make sense even when watched without sound. Your video must stop people from scrolling and get them curious enough to engage with it within a couple of seconds.

It’s unlikely that you’ll get everything right on your first or second try. You need to experiment and try out different things in order to figure out what works best for your page and the audience of your page. Keep this in mind and keep experimenting. Pay attention to your analytics and analyse what results your experiments are achieving. Then do more of the things that work and less of the things that don’t.

Social media marketers live on the shifting sands of the platforms they focus on. Facebook is constantly evolving their algorithm which impacts how many people see your content and how people interact with it. You need to stay up to date on the recent changes in order to know if there’s something new for you to consider in your content strategy. One way to do that is to follow the Locowise blog and @locowise for all the latest news, views, recommendations and stats.