Engaging with Facebook

In our last class, we had a great discussion about several social networks, including LinkedIn, Facebook, and a relative newcomer, Pinterest. With the exception of LinkedIn, most of these are generally used by consumers to interact with family and friends, you know, to be social. Brands do have an opportunity to become part of the conversation; we certainly saw many brands aiming to do just that during the Superbowl ads (mostly via Twitter hashtags, or labels).

Consumers will ultimately be the ones who decide how much you are able to reach them via Facebook by how much they engage with your brand on that platform. So, how can you get them to interact?

eMarketer recently shared some good information about what makes a Facebook post more likely to be engaging for consumers. As we discussed in class, photos are the number one way to get someone to interact with your Facebook page; the photo engagement rate was .37% vs .31% for video and .27% for text only. The article also pointed out that photos will continue to be powerful tools as Timeline reaches across more Facebook users (and potentially to brand pages as well). Here is one chart from the article:

The article goes on to discuss other ways to encourage engagement based on what words are used in the page's status update.

Don't assume consumers will see your Facebook updates in their news feeds just because they "like" your page. It is critical to get them to interact with you on that page. Ultimately, that's what we want, isn't it - to get our customers and prospects to build a relationship with us so we can sell to them or service them (and their friends) in the future? Keep it up for the long-term to see the best results.

What creative Facebook status posts from brands have you seen that have encouraged interaction? The photo at the top of this post is a screen shot of what Sanuk did recently on their Facebook page; love the long distance high five! I'd love to hear what you think works!