Without engagement content won’t spread but without content, there is nothing to spread. This is our motto.

When it comes to Facebook posts we are always looking at ways to maximise the engagement. How can we get more likes, more comments, more shares on this?

Ask around

Asking people to like works, asking a question to get comments works and using a photo to get more shares works.

But, if the content isn’t worth liking, commenting or sharing then no matter what you do, you won’t get that engagement.

Get talking

Engagement is the key but content is the king.

This is even more important since Facebook introduced their new algorithm that gives more weight to newsworthy content, less weight to “clickbait” and measures what people are engaging with.

Pushing out tons of posts a day won’t help. It is all about the content. And the post promoting that piece of content.

Best practice

Here’s what we’ve found works for us:

1. Don’t flood news feeds – maintain regular posts at least an hour apart
    
2. Keep your best content for later in the day – there are more people on Facebook in the evening (between 5pm and 9pm) than during the day
    
3. Focus on writing the best post possible – you want to give away enough information that people will engage with the post but not too much that they won’t click and YOU DO NOT WANT TO CLICKBAIT
    
4. Short sharp posts are the best – one to two sentences, don’t necessarily try to tell the whole story in this post, pick the key point of the story, the best quote or the conversation that this story creates
    
5. Ask questions to create the conversation

Growth spurt

In the past two years we have seen significant growth in our Facebook engagement and referral traffic.

Likes for our 12 daily newspaper Facebook pages have grown by 33%, page engagement by 38%, weekly post reach by 22% and referral traffic by 29%.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alexia Purcell is APN Australian Regional Media’s social media editor. She is an internationally recognised social media expert, journalist, university lecturer and speaker. You can connect with Alexia on Facebook at www.facebook.com/alexiajpurcell