TIPS AND TRICKS
Fan Engagement 101: Best practices to connect and engage with your audience
Your community of followers are your top supporters and fans, cheering you on every step of the way. For as much work as you put into building a strong fan base, it is just as important to keep engaging your followers to ensure your community thrives. Engaging with your followers also helps surface your content to others who may find it interesting. While there is no single formula for success, there are some best practices to consider to help you engage more meaningfully with your fans.
Best practices for engaging meaningfully with fans:
1
Understand your fans and their interests
2
Cultivate a safe space to engage with your audience
3
Recognize and reward your dedicated fans
I have not found a platform that focuses on community more than Facebook. The features that Facebook gives creators really allows us to create a special corner of the Internet that can be centered on just about anything. My community on Facebook is more than just a group of followers–they are individuals from around the world who inspire me on a daily basis. They also help and inspire each other. There simply is no other platform that would allow me to have the community that I do.
Understanding your fans and their interests
Understanding who makes up your community has multiple benefits, from helping you tailor your content to their interests to highlighting who engages with you the most. We know your time is precious, so we’re here to help you answer questions like: Who are my top fans? Which fan engaged most with my content last week? Where are most of my fans from?
Professional Dashboard is your one-stop-shop for all insights and performance. Professional Dashboard allows you to view audience and profile insights in aggregate (e.g., age group, gender, locations of your audience), as well as the performance of your content (e.g., engagement, reactions, comments, shares). We recommend you visit your dashboard regularly to keep track of how your content is performing over time.
Fans that engage with your content consistently may be rewarded with a special honorary badge, called top fan. With top fans, it’s easy to identify and interact with your most consistently engaged fans while incentivizing them to engage more with you. When these fans comment on your posts, you’ll see the badge next to their name. You can also see a list of all your top fans by clicking on a top fan badge and selecting “See all top fans”.
(Available on professional mode for profiles and new Pages experience)
We also recently launched a weekly engagement list that shows your most engaged followers each week along with the number of points they’ve earned that week from interacting with your content (e.g. reacting, commenting, sharing). This list refreshes every Sunday and you can find it in the “About” section of your Page.
The weekly engagement list allows me to recognize those who are most active on 'Tastes Seoul Good'. A little recognition goes a long way, and being able to simply say 'thank you' to my 'penguins' allows them to feel like they're a part of our journey.
Cultivate a safe space to engage with your audience
There are many ways to interact with your fans, including the comments section, through DMs, during live streams, in Groups and more!
The comments section is a great place to start building community and we’re making it easier for you to join in on conversations around your content. Look for the top fan badge as you scroll through your comments. If you’re short on time, you can prioritize responding to these comments from your most loyal fans. We’re also constantly working on improving notifications to surface the most relevant conversations with which you’ll want to engage.
We want to empower you to create a safe space on the platform so that people keep coming back. There’s a suite of comment moderation tools and controls available through Professional Dashboard to help you effectively manage these conversations, including the following key feature:
Moderation Assist: Reduce time moderating comments by proactively setting criteria in advance with Moderation Assist. Automatically hide incoming comments on your posts, such as comments with links, profiles with no profile photos, comments with keywords from a curated list and more.
Choose Who Can Comment: Limit who can comment on your posts.
Comment Ranking: We’ve also improved which comments on your posts appear first to help you find and engage with the most relevant conversations. These improvements include elevating comments and replies from creators to the top of the discussion thread on a post, and decreasing the visibility of spammy or repetitive comments.
Find out more information about these and other tools on our new Safety Hub. No matter how you choose to interact with your fans, we’re committed to making sure that you feel safe doing so.
Recognize and reward your dedicated fans
Your fans are here for you, and it’s important to make sure that they feel appreciated and seen. As with most things, you know your community best. Consider giving a quick shout out every now and then to fans who are consistently showing their support: top fans, Stars senders and subscribers. If you recently achieved an important milestone, think about celebrating with your fans through a fun contest or giveaway.
If you need some additional inspiration, Facebook offers several built-in tools to make it easy to show appreciation for your fans’ support. For top fans and Stars senders, we recently launched fan appreciation templates. You’ll receive a notification in the Facebook app and from there, you can access these templates that auto-mention these fans in a post or Story to easily show appreciation for their support. These templates are also available for your weekly engagement list and can be used to recognize your most engaged followers over a given week.
Make your top fans’ experience even more rewarding by giving them exclusive access to content. This feature, which is already available to subscribers, can be turned on for top fans by going into the post settings in composer.
Staying connected with my fans is the most important thing for me as a content creator, and a priority in my everyday life. While I'm unable to respond to every comment, message, or email, I always take time out of my day to connect with my followers.
