Simple Tweaks to Increase Your Facebook Audience Engagement

19 Oct Simple Tweaks to Increase Your Facebook Audience Engagement

Social media is constantly changing. Recently Facebook has added a few small features to help you get even more reach and engagement from your audience. We all know Facebook can be a tricky network when it comes to getting reach and interaction from your audience, but these simple tweaks can help you get a little more engagement from your existing Facebook page audience.

4 Simple Tweaks to Boost Your Facebook Audience Engagement

1.Use Preferred Audiences

Preferred Audiences are a way to prioritize who sees your Facebook posts or page. This does not restrict or diminish your reach – Facebook describes the feature like this – “With Preferred Audience, interest tags help prioritize posts that are most likely to be engaging for a person without limiting visibility for others”. At the moment only English language pages have the ability to set preferred audience. The interest tags are gathered from Facebook data (what content people are interacting with, what pages they like, ad data, etc.). You will be able to choose 16 interests.

There are 2 ways to optimize your Facebook page audience:

Preferred Audience by Post:

The preferred audience option allows Facebook to show your content to those who have expressed interests in line with interests you choose for each individual post. You can choose up to 16 interests. This will not limit reach, and should help your content get in front of audience members who will be interested in your content.

Pages with over 5,000 likes will have Preferred Audience turn on automatically. For the rest, you’ll have to dive into your settings to get the feature. In you Facebook fan page settings area. Look for “Audience Optimization for Posts” and tick the check box. Click “save changes” and you’ll be ready to roll.

Look for the little target circle under the area where you write the text for your post. From there a lightbox will pop up where you can choose targeting criteria. Facebook will help you with general ideas, but you can get creative and target publications, other pages, relevant companies etc.

Choose your interests click save. Now you can publish or schedule your post.

Page Preferred Audience: Just like post preferred audience, you can choose a preferred audience for your page. Again, head to your settings, but click on “Preferred Page Audience” on the left. You’ll be able to choose your target audience’s interests so your page is more likely not be shown to those who care about the subject you are posting about.

A fun extra with preferred audiences – You’ll be able to see in your page insights which posts you selected a preferred audience for. You can then compare and see which posts drive more engagement and reach. Remember to experiment with interest tags to gauge which ones work best for your business.  Your posts with preferred targeting will have a different icon under “Targeting” column in post insights.

Clicking to get further insights will show a “Preferred Audience” insights tab so you can see how your targeting did.

I took this screenshot right after I put my post up, but your post will needs least 100 views before you can see the Preferred Audience insights.

Once you can see insights they’ll look something like this:

Image via Social Media Examiner

2. Use Audience Restrictions

Unlike Preferred Page Audience, Audience Restrictions will only show posts to people that fit the criteria and interests you choose. This works well for when you have location specific promotions and you don’t want to bother the rest of your audience. This option shows your post only to those accounts that fall under restrictions you’ve set for each post. Narrowing your audience down even more may feel a little counter intuitive, but hyper segmentation allows you to create very specific content to appeal to individual sets within your audience. This option came in super handy when I worked on experiential marketing campaigns which involved samplings in different regions across the U.S. We used post targeting to let followers in specific regions know where sampling would be happening without disturbing the larger audience.

You’ll find Audience Restrictions by clicking on the same little target button you do to choose the Preferred Audience, instead this time you’ll look under the “Audience Restriction” tab. Here you’ll be able to restrict who sees your post by age, location, and language.

3. Invite Those Who Like Your Posts to Like Your Page

Not everyone who likes one of your posts necessarily likes the page itself. For a quick win, go on your fan page and click on your posts. If you click on the people who have liked your post a light box will pop up with a list of the post likers. To the right of each name is a box that lets you know if the person has already liked your page, if they haven’t, the box will say “Invite” click it and and invitation to like your page (from your personal Facebook account) will be sent to them.

We’ve been doing this with my agency clients and it’s a great way to build an engaged audience that is actually interested in what you have to say.

4. Use Your Cover Image

Now that your profile picture doesn’t get in the way of your cover image you have a little more freedom to get creative and visually brand yourself or your business. Use your cover image for branding, to promote a campaign, contest or other social media networks. Make sure the image is not blurry and to integrate your brand colors if you can. Don’t forget to include a description, call to action and link as a cover image switch goes out to your fans like a published post. Keep in mind mobile audiences and how the cover image looks like on a tablet or phone. Make sure all text is legible on mobile etc.

For more help building up your social media reach and engagement read: How to Increase Your Organic Reach on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and more.

I hope these simple tips can help you get even more from your Facebook fanpage! Got any quick win tips of your own? Share them in a comment 🙂

<3 DhariLo