Using Paid Ads to Improve Facebook Engagement

Obtaining organic engagement on Facebook and Instagram is becoming difficult. Organic engagement rates have dropped considerably over the past few years with engagement page posts dropping between 0.05% to 0.29%. As these rates are so low, it can feel like creating a decent organic social strategy isn’t worth it. However, there are a few things that you can do to improve overall engagement.

Promoting Posts

A lot of effort can go into creating images, captions and videos for your organic social posts. It takes time and money to create something that you feel would be able to capture the attention of your audience. You go to upload it, and you check the engagement the next day and find that the engagement rate is incredibly low and has been seen by very few people. All that time and effort can feel wasted. Some people might choose to delete the post and reupload, but this can sometimes create a negative effect on your page. The best thing you can do is to promote the post using paid advertising. If you’re looking to get more likes, comments, and reactions on the post then we recommend using the engagement objective to improve overall interactions. If you need more eyes on your brand then use the reach objective, this will push your post to as many people as possible within the limits of your audience and budget. If you need to get clicks to your website then use the website traffic objective, Facebook will push your post to people that are most likely to click on ads, helping you drive more traffic to your site. You don’t have to spend large amounts to improve your engagement rate. Something as little as £5 can push your post to the right people and can help obtain the engagement you’re looking for.

Don’t Boost Posts

Many businesses fall into the trap of boosting posts. We get it, it’s easy to do but that doesn’t mean it’ll give you the best outcome. We always recommend promoting your post via ads manager and going through the process of setting up a reach or engagement ad and selecting the post you would like to promote. Boosting posts is quite limited as the audiences tend to be broad and the results of boosted posts never seem to reach the heights of a promoted ad. But what is better about promoted ads? The answer is more options and more control. By using ads manager, you can use custom, lookalike, or pre-made audiences. You also have the option to turn off the ad if you feel that the post isn’t obtaining the results you’re looking for, and you can also create dark posts too! This means you can create exclusive posts that don’t appear on your feed. This is great for custom audiences or for creating posts that differ to what you would like your followers to see.

Using ‘Page Like’ Ads

Page like ads or growth ads are a great way to generate more page followers and will help in the long run to increase page engagement rates. Essentially, the more followers you have, the better chances you have of increasing engagement rate, reach, and interactions.

Make sure to check these ads regularly as you don’t want to be paying too much for each follower. You can set cost caps, change audiences, and images in order to control overall costs. To set these ads up you need to select the engagement objective and then select the ‘page like’ option underneath. The process is similar to a promoted post where you’ll be able to select your audience, demographic, location, and ad. For the creative, aim to use an image that will capture the attention of your audience, as you want to engage them and draw them into your business. The more followers you obtain, the more people will see your organic posts in your feed, leading to better engagement rates overall.

Remarketing Previous Engagers

So, you’ve got people engaged, what do you do now? We recommend remarketing to people that have previously engaged with your posts and ads. This is a very simple process and can actually lead to better engagement but also to more conversions if you’re using Facebook for e-commerce or services. To set these up you need to create a custom audience and select the Facebook & Instagram profile options. From here it will allow you to select “People who have previously engaged with any post or ad.”, select the date range (we recommend 30-90 days), name your audience and click ‘create’. Once this audience has populated, you can use this as a custom audience on your ads and reap the rewards of showing your posts/ads to people that have previously engaged with your business/brand.

Hopefully, all these tips help you with improving your engagement and Facebook ad journey. For more information, check out our other videos and blogs.

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Joaquin Lopez

Senior Paid Media Executive

A sci-fi movie buff, gamer, lover of dystopian fiction and self-taught bassist, we’ve concluded that Joaquin has quite the creative streak. A recent trip to Japan unearthed a love for ramen noodles, so we now know what to bribe him with! Fun fact: originally from Chile, Joaquin’s surname means ‘son of wolf’.

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