The best way to engage followers is to talk about subjects related to your brand, but not necessarily your own products or services. Brands looking to generate shares should use photos and videos in their posts, while a clear call to action helps drive more Likes, according to results of an internal study by Facebook.
On the Facebook Studio blog, the social giant shares insight from their recent four-week study of 23 brands across six industries. Posts were divided into three types of content to determine which drove the most user engagement.
Overall, posts related to the brand but not about specific products or services entice more users to Like, Share, or otherwise engage. Starbucks Facebook Page is a great example of this type of strategy; a quick look through their Timeline shows a great mix of posts about Starbucks initiatives, community involvement, coffee in general, but very few actually promoting a specific product.
In fact, Starbucks is featured as one of Facebook’s Success Stories on their Building Essential Connections resource site for business owners. Other featured brands include Country Crock, whose targeted ads towards moms helped them build their fan base to over 11 million people. Another is 1-800-FLOWERS, who increased wall engagement 393 percent through their Mother’s Day campaign, by making the Like button available on their website.
If you want to generate more shares, recommends Facebook, use photos, videos, or photo albums in your posts. Content with a clear call to action helps drive Likes, while asking questions will get you more comments. In all of the above scenarios, the topic of the post should be related to the brand, though not about one specific product or service.
The other types of content Facebook examined were messages about the product or service and messages unrelated to the brand. Because it was an internal study, the full data set in not available. We are unable to tell how non-related messages or product/service-related messages performed.
However, they have released a Best Practices guide for Page managers, available for download free from the Facebook site.