9 Facebook Marketing Tips to Improve Engagement

By Andrea Vahl
Published September 19, 2012 

Need some Facebook marketing inspiration?

Here are nine Facebook pages using some great techniques for more engagement.

Keep reading for some awesome tips from businesses of all sizes.

#1: Get Personal

Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn does a great job with a variety of posts but also adds some of his personal life. You can throw the old “don’t tell them what you had for lunch” advice right out the window with this tip.

Your community wants to get to know you and wants to be able to relate to you and your company.

You can tell them what you had for lunch. Better yet, add a picture!

Personal cover photo with his podcast setup and a picture of his son.

#2: Use Pictures

No doubt you’ve heard the visual marketing drumbeat, and it’s all true. Pictures are very powerful on Facebook. They take up more space in the news feed and can get more engagement than a straight text post.

Home Depot uses pictures very well by engaging their fans with project ideas, posts featuring employees and a fun game to guess the product. Notice how their pictures include a link to help drive traffic where they want.

Home Depot gets engagement with their fans by making them guess the product.

Home Depot features their employees.

#3: Run a Contest

Facebook Contests are a great way to bring some fun to your Facebook page. Not only that, they can help boost your likes, grow your email list and showcase a product or service that you offer. Not a bad marketing tool when you wrap that into one shiny package.

How to Market Your Horse Business uses contests very effectively by showcasing the contest in the Facebook cover photo all along the way.

Use the cover photo and app photos to help promote your contest.

#4: Have Fun

Even if you are a “serious” business, you can still have a funny-bone. Salesforce does a great job with their “SaaSy, VP of fun” character that makes regular appearances on their Facebook page.

Using humor on Facebook is a great way to get interaction. People are usually on Facebook to be social, and if you’re able to entertain and inform in your posts, you will get more shares, comments and likes.

SaaSy, the VP of fun, gets great interaction.

Not only does Salesforce create their own fun posts, but they also feature crowdsourced fun.

#5: Showcase a Cause

Many pages have causes that they support—either through their own foundations or by running events that benefit other causes.

Little Man Ice Cream does a great job of running events that also benefit causes. Their Hula Hoop Competition was an event that benefitted a local farm providing sustainable food. They featured the event on their cover photo and through photos on their page.

Little Man Ice Cream featured their event to benefit a local cause on their cover photo.

Working with causes is a great way to benefit your company and your community.

#6: Use Facebook’s Features

Use some of Facebook’s features such as apps, pinning posts and highlighting tohelp your page stay interesting.

Each week, Tumi features a different bag they sell by using an app to showcase the type of person who uses that bag in a “Case Study” (and I’m pretty sure the pun is intended).

They also use a contest app to give the bag away to one lucky entrant and they pin the contest post to the top of their page to further highlight the contest.

Use Facebook applications to keep your page fresh.

The orange flag in the upper-right means the post is pinned to the top of the Timeline and will be more visible.

#7: Consider Using Your Personal Profile

If you’re branding your business as YOU, such as a Realtor, author, or consultant, then you may want to consider using your Facebook personal profile to help your marketing.

Brent Humpherys, uses his personal profile to talk about his day-to-day activity as a Realtor while sprinkling in his life as a dad and husband.

When talking to Brent to find out how his Facebook use affects his business, he said that 80% of his business is directly affected by his presence on Facebook.

Share your personality while sharing news about your business.

Don’t be afraid to get personal if you are branding as you.

Brent shares his testimonials on his personal profile.

#8: Crowdsource Your Content

Medtronic Diabetes does a great job responding to customer issues in their posts. But they also like to feature their customers both in their cover photo and in pictures on their Facebook Timeline.

One thing that they do differently is that they have created an app on their Facebook page that will allow people to submit their story to be a candidate to be featured. This gives Medtronic a chance to review the stories and choose which ones to feature.

Medtronic uses an app to have people submit stories to share.

Then Medtronic will post the pictures and the story of the people who have submitted them.

Using crowdsourcing allows your page to be more of a community and connects people together.

#9: Love Your Fans

Campbell’s Soup uses photos and posts to show their fans how much they love them. Make sure you don’t take your community for granted. Show a little love! It also helps to be creative in the way you express it so that it adds some fun and gets shared.

Show your fans a little love!

Campbell’s also does a great job of responding to posts, both positive and negative. Having excellent customer service can help your brand stay strong.

Excellent customer service is another way to love your fans.

As mentioned, many of these pages use several of these strategies on Facebook—some were employing all of them. All of these pages have great engagement and have seen a lot of growth on Facebook over the last couple of months.

I hope these nine tips gave you some great ideas about new things to try and ways to stand out and will ultimately help your business grow.