Facebook Engagement: How to Get Seen in the Facebook News Feed

Do you want to understand Facebook engagement?

Are you looking for Facebook engagement tactics that lead to news feed visibility?

To learn how to better use Facebook, I interview John Haydon for this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode, I interview John Haydon, author of Facebook Marketing for Dummies and founder of Inbound Zombie, a consultancy focused on small- and medium-sized nonprofits.

John shares why Facebook engagement is so important.

You'll learn how to better engage Facebook fans.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below!
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Facebook Engagement
Why Facebook engagement is so important

John says that his definition of engagement—from a Facebook perspective—is like, comment and share, because that's what really matters.

In his experience working with Facebook and nonprofits, which is slightly different than the for-profit world, John encourages an organization to work with existing community and get that community talking about them.

He says he thinks about engagement, as it pertains to Facebook, as word of mouth.

John explains that when your current customers or donors engage with content from your Facebook page (or talk about that content), their friends see that content. That's increased exposure for your organization.

John says that exposure starts by getting your current community, the people who already love you, to engage first.

Listen to the show to find out how the news feed algorithm impacts engagement.

How Facebook page managers should spur engagement

John wants to change the word posting to planting because when you plant something, like a bush, you have to stick around and take care of it. If you post an update on Facebook, you want to pay attention to how it's performing. If people are commenting, liking and sharing, you want to be involved in that comment thread.

Recalling Amy Porterfield's words from a few weeks ago, John says the more people notice that you stick around, the more they'll engage with your content.

John agrees that community management on Facebook comes down to identifying the best-performing content, then tweaking and experimenting with content to optimize how you're posting, topics, times that you're posting, etc.

Listen to the show to hear what you’re missing by not interacting with what people are saying on your Facebook page.

The Talking About This metric and how it's calculated

John explains this metric as anything that a Facebook user does to create a story in their news feed for their friends to see.

He says that when a user shares something, likes a page, RSVPs to an event a page has published or tags that page in a photo or a status update, all of these actions put content into the news feed of that user's friends so that they become aware. It's really what you might call viral reach.

Anything that creates viral reach is Talking About This.

Listen to the show to learn more about Talking About This.

How a Facebook page used engagement to achieve a goal

Three years ago, the Brain Aneurysm Foundation was doing Facebook upside-down. John worked on a strategy that started with letting people use the page to express who they are. The foundation tapped into the passion around the issue and encouraged people to share their stories on the page.

One of the first posts was, "If you've had a friend who found out they had a brain aneurysm, what would be your number-one tip?"

Now their Facebook page is mostly made up of posts by others who come to share their stories.