It’s a daily battle, especially for a small business on a limited budget. Being noticed online.

Did you know that on average only 16% of your followers see your posts, photos and statuses you put on your business Facebook page?

Facebook knows that businesses are competing on their platform for the attention of their readers. They have increased the options for Facebook advertising over the last few years, but at the same time have limited the organic (read: unpaid) reach of businesses. Being able to reach your target audience and engage with them on a limited budget is what small businesses and large businesses alike are trying to figure out. In the end, it all comes down to engagement.

That’s something that we talk about every day, as engagement is one of our main indicators here at SweetwaterNOW. We manage the largest social media presence in the area with over 16,000 Facebook followers. We celebrate adding new friends and followers, but most importantly we want an ENGAGED audience.

WE WANT ENGAGEMENT

Better to have 30,000 followers and 5% engagement? Or 2000 followers with 1000 dedicated readers that love what you are posting and like, comment and share on every post?

We’ll take the latter each and every day. But how do you know what’s engaging?

USE YOUR INSIGHTS

This graph below is pulled directly from Facebook Insights. And guess what?… insights are free. As you can see, this week (and most weeks) we have the most engagement, or are within the top 3 statewide. (Compared to local sources there really isn’t a comparison when it comes to engagement, content and reach.) We are running at 50% engagement – in layman’s terms we are doing pretty dang awesome.

As you can see, our engagement is right over 8,000 – half of our audience. Not only will you see that we have the most engagement, but our staff has created and posted more content. That’s something that we get excited about because content is our business.

But what about your business? You should get familiar with your Facebook insights because they can tell you a lot. They can show you the most engaging content you published for the week in a snapshot and also how your audience is reacting to your posts.

Once you start seeing which posts do really well, and also see those posts that you thought would be great but just didn’t strike the tone with your audience, you are on your way to duplicating engaging content. You can also use Facebook insights to see the demographics of your Facebook audience (age, gender, location). From there, you can start using the other tools to target your audience even further based on their interests and behaviors. We’ll save that for another post 😉

HERE IS A TIP FOR ENGAGEMENT: GREAT PHOTOS OF YOUR PRODUCT, STAFF OR CUSTOMERS ARE  EXTREMELY ENGAGING! TRY IT OUT.

EXTEND YOUR REACH

Another great way to boost engagement is by having your page or content linked or shared by a company that has a larger online presence. This is something that we offer with our sponsored content that we call “On the NOW”. In this example, you will see that the business page is linked in the Facebook status. It shows up as a blue link that is clickable by readers.

Not only does this post drive engagement to the content (the link to the job openings), but we are now driving traffic directly to the Facebook page. As a smart advertiser, which you are, then you’d also share the link to your Facebook page and now we are on our way to ENGAGEMENT. You have extended the reach of your content in three ways. The post being pushed out to our readers on SweetwaterNOW, the content being shown to our social media audience, the content being shared to your own social media audience.

Make sense? Reach out to us if you have any questions. We love this stuff and can help with sponsored content and also give you some Facebook tips.