Experts Blog

The Key to Facebook Engagement is________Fill In The Blank

By Shelly Kramer on Sep 20, 2012 - 12:14 PM

If you're the admin of a Facebook page (or 10), you likely spend a lot of time cultivating your Facebook marketing strategy. And with Facebook changing things on what seems like a weekly basis, it can be hard to keep up with the latest tips and tricks.

The good news? Despite Facebook's ongoing evolution, it's certainly possible to cultivate an engaged Facebook following as part of your larger digital marketing strategy. Regularly posting relevant, interesting content is a big part of Facebook community management.

Interacting with your Facebook audience is also important. After all, a social presence without conversation is, well, the opposite of social. And although you can't necessarily expect each and every Facebook post to spark dozens and dozens of comments, you can learn from successful case studies to better understand what prompts Facebook users to interact with page content.

Take JetBlue, for example. The airline recently experimented with fill in the blank status updates as part of their Facebook content strategy. Over a six-week period, JetBlue incorporated a fill in the blank post every 7-10 days like the one that appeared on March 26 and coincided with the release of The Hunger Games: If your city could be any district, it would be ______________. May the odds be ever in your favor.

SimplyMeasured analyzed the performance of JetBlue's Facebook content over that six-week period. The fill in the blank posts averaged 119 comments, while the second most popular content type, links, averaged 61 comments - a 182 percent increase, as illustrated in the chart below.

Although SimplyMeasured's analysis indicates that fill in the blank posts can be incredibly successful in driving comments, it's important to note that these types of posts don't necessarily drive high engagement across the board. Links actually resulted in a higher number of likes and shares for JetBlue, compared to multimedia, followed by fill in the blank posts and status updates.

The larger lesson to be learned from JetBlue's approach is that it's important to experiment with a variety of Facebook content types. Take note as to which ones spark the most audience engagement. You don't want to inundate your page with those posts, but you do want to make sure that you regularly include them as part of your content strategy.

To me, that's one of the exciting things about Facebook marketing...and about digital marketing in general. Creating a solid strategy is a key to getting started, but after that, it's just as critical to constantly analyze and tweak your approach. Doing the same thing month after month won't get you very far, especially in the ever-changing and fast-moving world of the Internet. Instead, savvy marketers understand the importance of listening, collecting analytics and then analyzing the data in order to make larger contextual decisions that can drive not just your digital strategy, but overall business decisions, too.

If you work with Facebook pages, I'd love to hear what types of content have proved most successful in driving engagement among your audience.

Facebook Engagement