Facebook engagement: connect, invite, like, comment, share, post – whether you’re trying to promote a personal profile, private group or business page – the point is to successfully connect with your community. Whether it’s friends and family, a local network of people with common goals or a more global community you want to reach, content and engagement is the key. In this edition of our series, we’ve put together a few key tips and decoded some terms to help you reach and grow your audience.
Grow Your Audience
Growing an audience is a multi-ingredient recipe, no one action will result in overnight success. Organic growth (not using paid boosts or ads) can take a bit of time but if you put in consistent, quality effort, two things will start to happen:
- Facebook users begin to recognize and trust your page, interact with you and ultimately start sharing your content to their audience.
- Facebook’s algorithm will learn to understand your goals: who to show your content to and what to show you for suggested connections.
There are a few key things that will help to gain followers for any page. We’ve put together a short tips for engagement infographic, and Facebook’s Meta Business Help Center has resources like this Grow your Page and audience engagement guide:
Search and Connect
One of the best ways to start growing your page is to Follow or Like other business pages and join group pages of cities or organizations where you can connect and share what you want to promote. Often when you start to follow another page, they will follow you back. Your page will show up to the other followers and group members and Facebook will start to suggest following your account to those accounts.
- Use the Search function or your Menu options to find people, restaurants, entertainment, events etc.
- As you start to connect, Facebook will show you people and popular profiles it thinks you might like to consider
- Click Interested or Going on community events – your response will show up to anyone who sees that event in their browsing, raising awareness and recognition of your page
Invite Followers
Instead of waiting to be discovered, start Inviting your personal connections and people who engage with your page (through the Like button or sharing your content) to Follow or Like your page:
- On your business page, use the See more menu function you can select Invite friends. It will prompt you to switch to your personal profile and walk you through the steps to send invitations
Sometimes your main notifications will prompt you to invite people to follow you, but you can send invitations anytime to anyone with a public setting who engages with your page.
- Clicking on the Emoji icons for like, love, care… in your posted content
- A window will pop up with the accounts and public profiles who clicked on your content
- Click on any available invitations or follow opportunities
Inviting through Meta Business Suite content planner:
- Notifications will show on your monthly calendar view
- Click on the Invite button
- A window will pop up with a list of all the accounts who have interacted with your page
- You can preview each profile by clicking on the image icon to make sure it doesn’t look spammy before extending the invitation
Like, Comment and Share
Once you connect, you will see content from people and pages you follow in your home feed. Engaging with your audience is a two way street. You need to be interactive with the content that you see and acknowledge those who engage with your content, this will help you keep and attract more followers.
Take the time to Like, Comment or Share things you see and appreciate. Always, always, always fact check before sharing other people’s content as the information they post may not be accurate or share worthy.
- Like, Love, Care, Laugh, Exclaim, Feel Sad or Angry – is the most basic interaction
- Commenting includes you in the conversation and gives you the opportunity to draw connections from their audience
- Share important or interesting information or events that you agree with or want to support and gain attention in the meantime:
- Introduce what you are sharing – copy and paste or create your own version of the shared info
- Use the @Mention to connect with them and give credit for the shared content
- You get additional content for your audience that you didn’t have to create
Posting Content
When posting any content on Facebook, consider who will see what you share before posting and make sure you are sharing true, interesting and relevant information. All content and information you share needs to meet Facebook’s Community Standards and cannot infringe on any other account’s intellectual property or rights.
There are three ways to create content on your page:
- On your home page in the empty spot at the top of your feed “What’s on your mind?”
- Through your home page with the menu shortcuts
- Through Meta Business Suite.
The most commonly used content types are Posts, Stories, Reels and Events. The differences between them are:
- Posts short or long messages to share information or announcements. Use good quality pictures or video to get more attention
- Stories can be short videos, photos, posts or events and are only visible for 24 hours to your followers. Using text is optional but music catches attention
- Reels are a short video with music or a message that are shown to a wide public audience and a great way to get discovered
- Adding an Event creates a dedicated sub-page where you can add all the info and an image for any online or in-person activities
To help you get more followers, Facebook has the option of paying to show your content to more people by either boosting a post or creating an advertisement if you want more people to see your message in a short time. The difference between boosting or running an ad is in the audience details but both are easy to set up through your account.
Join Us
The purpose of this How to Use Facebook series of articles is to help people who are already on Facebook to connect and share information more effectively with their communities. We’ve gathered some information on how to best use Facebook for organic growth and put together a short infographic with some basic rules of engagement.
Catch up on previous articles in our series if you’re not sure why Facebook is the most popular social media platform online, or how to create a business page or group page.
Watch for our next installation for tips on how to best use tags, mentions and hashtags effectively.
Follow us @BC Community Response Networks to catch all the latest information and resource updates and share with your local community. We invite you to tag us in your posts so we can celebrate with you and share your events too.
And be sure to check back here on our website regularly for all our event updates, resources and information on a wide-array of topics.
Facebook resources for engagement in this article:
Tips for engagement infographic
Grow your page audience and engagement
Facebook’s Community Standards
Intellectual property or rights
Invite people to Facebook event
Explore our website to learn more about BC CRN or connect with your local CRN for more information or resources.
