Written by ContentPowered.com
Engagement is important. Reach is declining. People are jaded. Children are starving for content, and food. It’s almost 2015. It’s time to change the paradigm, it’s time to leverage synergies, it’s time to boost engagement for the coming year.
Want more engagement? Try out these post ideas.
Post a Story
Have any business growth anecdotes, the equivalent of an embarrassing childhood story? Something you can portray with a moral or a lesson you learned moving forward, a mistake you made but will never make again? These stories, particularly if you have a good picture to accompany them, work wonders for engagement.
These kinds of posts work because they bring you down from the corporate high horse. Too many people are too used to companies trying to present themselves as infallible. It’s all too common in our modern society for a business to falter or fail, only to point the finger and absolve themselves of all responsibility.
Owning up to a past mistake humanizes your company, and it gives your users an idea that you’re going to be just as humble and responsible moving forward, no matter what skeletons you might actually have in your closet. Just don’t actually air those skeletons.
Throw Back Thursday a Milestone
Facebook allows you to add milestones to your news feed, and you have the option of hiding them from the news feed, in case you want to add a bunch all at once and avoid spamming them. Instead of doing any of that, why not come up with tall tales, apocryphal legends or legitimate legacies behind each milestone and queue them up for each Thursday?
This gives you three benefits. First, you’re able to add a milestone in a way that’s visible and encourages engagement and discussion. Second, you’re able to participate in the Internet-wide #TBT meme. Third, you bring a bit of corporate lore or history to the fore, giving your users something interesting to learn about you.
Post a CEO Selfie
Selfie culture is often scoffed at by senior citizens and those out of touch with the modern youth, but they are alive and well on social media despite all the ferocious backlash. Why not get in on the game and ruin it for all the youngsters?
You need to up your selfie game if you’re going to take one for the unwashed masses, of course. Your selfie needs to be astonishing, extraordinary, unusual or just plain weird. Take a picture from an exclusive location most people won’t be able to visit. Take a selfie involving stars the usual customer would never meet. Or go the down-to-earth route and take a selfie with a customer and feature it. Just, you know, make sure your selfies are worth viewing.
Curate Viral Content
Sometimes the best post isn’t one of your posts at all. Why not become a content curator and gather up some of the best posts making the rounds in your industry each week? You could easily start a Friday feature to bring these posts to your audience, and all you need to do is accumulate links throughout the week. Don’t worry if your readers have already seen them; plenty of them won’t have, and it makes following your page a perfect way to keep up with industry news, not just your news.
Poll Your Fans for Business Decisions
How would you improve our <insert top selling product here>?
What one feature do you want the most in <Our Software>?
If you could add or remove one thing from <Our catalog>, what would it be?
These are the sorts of questions you can ask your users to bring in a ton of engagement. Everyone has an opinions. Everyone thinks they know how to make your business better. Maybe one out of ten thousand of those suggestions is worth listening to, and one out of another million of those is worth implementing, but you never know when that one in a trillion suggestion is going to show up. Even if it doesn’t, you can still brainstorm ideas or identify the truly awful suggestions to mock around the office on Monday morning.
Inspirational Quotes
Everyone loves a good pithy quotation now and then. Find some that haven’t been used on inspirational images recently and shop one up. Just throw it right on there, over top of the image, on text that stands out. Tint the background image if you want, skew it so it looks more artistic, I don’t care. It doesn’t even matter. A starry sky, a bunch of leaves, an empty road, a full road, it’s all the same.
If your company is the right mixture of pop-savvy and quirky, you can go an alternate route. Post quotes from nerdy movies. You’d be surprised how much engagement you’d get from a picture of a tree with the words “I am Groot” shopped over it. Bonus points for making that the only description.
Post a Video
What video? What of? Who cares! Videos on Facebook receive a massive amount of engagement, though the number itself is a bit of a lie because of how Facebook both counts video plays and autoplays videos. Even discounting views, you’ll get a pile of engagement deep enough to bury yourself in, just by posting a video. If your video is somehow related to your industry, business or product, all the better.
Post Your Products
No, don’t just post an advertisement for your product. Post a picture of someone making use of it. Sell a watch? Post pictures of your watch in creative positions, on a high-class businessman eating dinner or on someone on the red carpet. Sell software? Well, uh, I guess just post a picture of someone smiling at a computer. It won’t be the most ridiculous picture ever posted, at least.
Highlight Fans
Your fans are the people giving you engagement, so make a game out of it, somehow. Pick some way to choose a fan each week or month and give them something of a featured reward for winning the competition. If it’s a monthly contest, it doesn’t need to be much; a 10% discount coupon is plenty.
Post About a Trending Topic
You can see trends on the sidebar of Facebook. If you want to get in on that action, you need to be quick; they change from day to day, even from hour to hour on busy days. Monitor trending topics, pick something to write about, write a quick post and send it along for editing and publication. Follow the trends and get people talking.
