How to grow your Facebook engagement & audience
Facebook is a social platform in which people share content with their friends and family. Most often, the typical spam post of “Hey listen to my music” never seems to work. Instead, content that focuses on the social life of an artist seems to perform very well. For example, this could be a daily/weekly 5 minute documentary about the artist, or even a live Q&A using the in-app live-streaming feature. The possibilities are endless. But with a large saturation of content, here are some tips to help you stand out:
Have an amazing caption
Firstly, the caption needs to be absolutely amazing in order to captivate the audience. In order to “hack” the Facebook algorithm, write something that encourages an interaction, e.g. “What’s your favourite song of mine?” The algorithm naturally prioritizes posts that are getting loads of engagement, and so if lots of people are commenting their favourite song, Facebook will view it as good content, and therefore push it to more people. Also, the first 3 seconds of any videos need to be intriguing. You’ve got to remember that your audience is simply scrolling through their news feed. If it’s not engaging, they won’t bother watching the rest.
Analyse your audience
One of my favourite tips is to spend several hours analyzing the analytics of your audience. To do this, simply click “Analytics > People” on your Facebook page manager. As you’re able to view the average age, location, language etc, of your audience, it allows you to gain a better insight as to the type of content that will work well. For example, if your audience is most active between 4pm-9pm, post at those times. If the majority speak Spanish, post in Spanish. You basically want to optimize your content for the demographic.
Use live video
Another tip for increasing your Facebook audience/engagement is live video. If you’re a producer, you could set up a live stream once a week in which you answer questions from fans. Now, there’s no point in saying “share this stream”. After all, there’s no reason for them to. Therefore, you need to incentivize your audience to engage, e.g. offering a private Skype session to a random person who shares the stream. Just give them a reason. Or alternatively, if you’re not really into that kinda thing, you could always use live streams as a way to share special moments with the audience. It could be conquering your fears whilst your audience views it, an interview, or even the birth of your child (it’s been done).
Finally, if you are a content creator, you could be working alongside curation pages in order to grow your content. After all, people are following that page in order to view high-quality content within your niche. For example, if you are creating EDM songs from internet memes, you could film the production process, and then send it to these large pages to potentially upload your content. Once the post goes live, your fan page would be tagged – therefore bringing you more traffic.
Perfect your pitch
When you send your content to large pages, you’ve got to remember that they receive tonnes of upload requests each day. In your pitch, there are several things to consider:
- How is your content different from everyone else’s?
- What can you provide to the page in return for posting?
- Is the quality of the content good enough?
Simply asking for your video to be uploaded is unlikely to work. And so you have to offer a valuable proposition so that the deal is beneficial for both parties. Do this with 10-20 large pages, and your Facebook page will be growing extremely quickly.