Facebook engagement is an important part of marketing. The debate about whether or not it has a positive effect on SEO is ongoing, but what we know for sure is that more social engagement only helps across the board. Of course you want your customers and fans to engage, but sometimes the best way to get that started is to have your own employees engaging with your Facebook posts. Here’s a program that will help you make that happen and kick your social media marketing up to the next level.
THE NUMBERS
Why do you want your employees engaging exactly? For every Facebook post that your employee engages with, 20-50% of their friends will see that post. The average Facebook user has over 200 friends, so if your employees like 2-5 posts, they’ll expose your brand to every friend on their list. Not only will your brand be shown to these people, it will be presented as a trusted recommendation from a friend, which is the most powerful social signal of all.
It’s not 100% confirmed, but it’s also believed that Facebook social signals tell Google that the content is interest and relevant and thus should be ranked higher. That means if you have your employees liking and sharing your blog posts that are syndicated to Facebook, it will boost the SEO effectiveness of those articles, and thusly your SEO effectiveness as a whole.
THE PROGRAM
Since their Facebook pages are private by nature, it’s illegal to MAKE any employee engage on work materials with their personal Facebook page, so don’t do that.
We find it best to incentivize employees by offering a cash reward for engaging with Facebook. Usually, it’s enough to offer a few dollars for a comment on your Facebook page or a few dollars more for sharing one of your Facebook posts. Of course, you’ll want to put a daily cap on how much they can earn so they don’t like and share you into the poorhouse. About $10 daily should be sufficient, and generally, we find that only a handful of employees will take advantage of the program.
To increase program adoption, we recommend paying out the Facebook engagement bonus in cash, preferably at a meeting that has all the employees (or all the employees of a particular department) in attendance. When they see the cash being handed over, it will make the reward seem very tangible and encourage them to get on board.
As an alternative, if you’re a workplace that blocks social media access, you may not have to pay at all. In some cases, simply allowing employees to who post on or share your Facebook content to use social media for a period of each day will be enough incentive.
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
It’s not enough that your employees engage with your Facebook page, they need to be careful to engage in an organic way. This means that there should be absolutely no “canned” responses, and they shouldn’t try to be salesmen for the brand. They should respond to your page as though it was any other page they liked on Facebook, and only share posts that they may normally share anyway.
If your Facebook page isn’t creating anything that they would normally comment on or share, then there is likely a problem with the content you are putting out.
If you’d like more details on how to execute a facebook engagement program or improve the quality of your current Facebook posts, contact us at questions@wikimotive.com.