Engagement on Facebook could mean any number of actions. It could be likes, shares, comments, check-ins, or tags. The reason you want to increase engagement on Facebook is that it helps to extend your organic reach.
Each time your audience engages with your post in any of the ways we've just mentioned, your visibility extends to their own network of friends. For your travel company, this means extra exposure at zero cost.
Engagement is also an indicator that your audience is interested in your brand. The interaction signals that they see your post or brand as one worthy of attention in the saturated online space.
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Increase Engagement on Facebook With These 9 Tips
Facebook’s algorithm, which determines what people see on their newsfeed, places certain posts above others according to a number of determiners.
The short of it is, high-quality content shared by your friends that is likely to generate meaningful interactions will appear above any publisher posts. The focus is on a quality browsing experience based on a person’s likes, interests, and network.
What this means is your travel business will need to work harder to be seen organically (without paid advertising) on the newsfeed of your followers. These nine tips will help you to increase engagement on Facebook, and up your organic visibility.
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Get To Know Your Audience
Facebook insights provide useful information on who your audience is and how they engage with your material. Try out different content formats, for example, video layouts or 360-degree pictures, to see which people respond to the most.
By understanding what performs best on your page, you can customize your posts to get the most engagement out of them.
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Your Content Should Add Value
Whether the value is added by teaching, inspiring, informing, or entertaining your audience, your content needs to improve their lives in some way.
Make sure it is varied and interesting. If your travel company offers group bicycle tours in Thailand, then there is no need to solely post content on those subjects. Include more about travel in Thailand or other famous bike tours around the world for example.
One look at See Australia's profile and you know why they have such a large following. Despite beautiful imagery, they add quirky photos and comments to entertain their followers.
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Post Regularly And At The Right Times
It is important to figure out where your followers are based geographically. This is because the Facebook newsfeed is constantly being updated with the latest posts. Therefore, you need an idea of the majority of your followers’ time zone location, so that you can schedule or post content to go live when they are active on the platform.
Too late at night and they may be asleep, too early during a work day and they will be in morning meetings and not browsing on their mobile. Over the weekend and they will be busy with family or running errands etc.
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Optimize For Mobile
Most of your audience access Facebook from their mobile – according to Hootsuite, 88% of them to be exact. Not only that, but they only spend a matter of seconds on a single piece of content.
Keep this in mind for your posts to increase engagement on Facebook. Make sure that all of your content is optimized for mobile – this means eye-catching imagery and headlines with fewer text blocks. You need to halt people for a second while they are browsing and encourage them to react to your post.
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If You Are Not Using Video Content, It Is Time To Start
Video on Facebook sees higher engagement than text or photos making it the best format to go viral.
When filming, keep in mind that you will get the most mobile screen space by using a portrait orientation for your videos.
Also, see to it that videos still relay a message even if the sound is off. People browsing the platform will not necessarily be doing so with the sound on so it needs to be able to capture their attention even in silent mode.
When it comes to the algorithm, posting natively is best. This means you should upload your video content directly to the platform, and not share it from another social media profile.
Tour Radar's video tour of Iceland highlights beautiful parts of the country. In just a few days, it has generated quite a bit of interest.
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Use Facebook Stories
Stories have the advantage of appearing in the top of everyone’s newsfeed, so they are a great way to be seen on the platform.
They provide an opportunity to add content in an unobtrusive manner as many times as you like without spamming your followers’ newsfeed.
The stories format is expected to be lower quality visually. So you can get away with capturing spur of the moment imagery that is newsworthy without needing expensive equipment or extensive preparation.
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Ask Interesting Questions
Asking a question prompts your followers to respond and engage with your post. You could try things like to ask them for their opinion on a matter or see what sort of content they would like to see more of from you.
Naturally, if you go this route, you should respond by posting the content that your followers request to see.
You should also take the time to return the favor and reply to the comments on your question post. Your followers will appreciate the fact that you are willing to engage with them and it doesn’t always need to be an extensive answer on your part.
See how much interest and response this post by Visit Scotland garnered. Not only views but comments, likes, and shares too.
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Include User Generated Content To Extend Reach
As Facebook’s algorithm prioritizes content from family and friends to make a more meaningful experience on the platform, now more than ever you need to incorporate user-generated content into your own.
The connection created by sharing one person’s (or group of people’s) content and tagging them into it, means that the post extends to their audience network too.
In addition to that, user-generated content also acts as marketing material. A personal endorsement of your brand will help raise your overall profile and trustworthiness.
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Use Call To Action (CTA) Buttons
Incorporating CTA buttons on your profile page adds an extra layer to encourage engagement.
For your travel brand, the CTA could include a booking button, click through to your website, contact you via messenger, or shop your products or offers.
Intrepid Travel uses several on their Facebook profile – you can see here CTA's asking whether you would recommend the company, as well as a Book Now and Send Message buttons.
Summary
Instead of letting Facebook’s algorithm take you down the newsfeed, consider it an opportunity to reinvent your strategy on the social media platform and leverage your travel brand.
Remember that overall, in order to increase engagement on Facebook your content must add value.
Luckily in the travel sphere, this is not hard to do as travel is such an enriching experience. With the right content and approach, you have the potential to grow your brand relatively quickly thanks to the sheer size of the social media platform.
