Enhance audience engagement
You've planned your video series, established a viewer base, and started sharing your content with the world.
What now?
The key to getting your videos more exposure is an interactive and engaged community. When your fans comment, share, search for, and revisit your videos, those videos will be shown to more people.
But how can you create videos that generate meaningful conversation and build community? This blog will go through some strategies for encouraging your fans to get engaged.
Why is engagement important?
These days we're focused on connecting people with meaningful content that sparks connections between people.
This means that we prioritize content that generates authentic interactions and that people seek out and return to on a regular basis. These posts will appear higher on the News Feed compared to other posts.
“Engagement bait” vs. truly engaging content
Before we dive into ways to engage your audience, let's talk about some common missteps.
We've learned that people dislike spammy posts on Facebook that bait them into interacting with likes, shares, comments, and other actions.
This is called “engagement bait,” and it's usually an attempt to game our News Feed algorithm by boosting engagement to get greater reach. We give a lower News Feed ranking to people and pages that use engagement bait, so it's best to avoid these tactics.
Some examples of engagement bait include:
React baiting: Asking people to react to the post (includes like, love, haha, wow, sad, and angry).
Comment baiting: Asking people to comment with specific answers.
Share baiting: Asking people to inauthentically share the post with their friends.
Tag baiting: Asking people to tag their friends.
Instead, try to build more authentic engagement with your fans. You can get authentic engagement from your videos by asking for ideas for future videos or asking an interesting question for fans to discuss in the comments. Keep your stories relevant and meaningful, and people will naturally want to engage. We'll discuss some ways to engage with your audience in the next section.
You can learn more about engagement bait and how to avoid using it here.
Start the Conversation
Now it's time to focus on engaging your fan base! When you build an active community around your content, you'll inspire more authentic, meaningful interactions.
Spark conversation by:
Engaging directly with your audience. Like and reply to fan comments on videos, and get the ball rolling by leaving the first comment as an icebreaker, e.g. “What was your favorite part of the video?” Or take it a step further by using tools like Facebook Live (and Live With), or create a poll on your Page to see what your fans want to see next.
Rewarding fans with exclusive content. Bring the fans into your content by highlighting a top comment or fan, crowdsourcing ideas for future videos, or calling out specific fan comments in your videos.
Creating content that's likely to drive discussion. Focus on content your audience will connect and engage with. While shorter, meme-style content can see shares, this content may not encourage deeper interaction among people around it.
Looking closely at engagement around each video. Are people engaging in your video? Have you observed a lot of reactions, shares, and conversation around the video? Check out your Insights help you identify what's working and what's not.
Check out this blog on how to create loyal viewers that inspire viewers to come back for more.
Building a Community
When you engage with your followers and fans on Facebook, you're doing more than just driving up metrics, you're building an active community around your content.
View Video Insights
