How to increase your Facebook Group engagement

Have you checked where you stand on our global group engagement benchmark and think your Facebook Group engagement is lower than it could be? Or maybe you are seeing your Group engagement decline recently because of some industry or seasonal changes. You have come to the right place.

In this article we will look at how to increase your Facebook Group’s engagement and at the strategies and various kinds of content you can share to increase the engagement of your group.

For the purposes of this article, we are defining engagement rate as the amount of reactions, comments, posts and contributions your groups members have made within your group in a specified period over the number of active members within the same period.

Pro tip: To increase engagement in your Facebook Group you need to post highly relevant content with viral potential everyone can relate to and at the right times.

Let’s look at this in more detail.

Post when members are online

Have a look at the Group Insights to see when your members are online and post your most engaging content then. This way you will be promoting engagement when your members are most likely to see it.

Approve posts at the right time

We do our best to approve posts when we think relevant members will be online. For example, in our Solo Female Travel group we approve posts about Europe when European members are more likely to be active so the poster will receive relevant answers from locals. If your group is global, this tactic will help your content be discovered and your members getting relevant answers.

Post content that has highest reach

We all know that certain types of content perform better on Facebook than others, making sure that you share the type of content Facebook wants will guarantee higher reach and thus, higher engagement with the content. If few of your members see the content you share, it is unlikely they will engage with it.

As a rule of thumb, below is the type of content that performs best sorted from best to least:

• Memes.
• Videos that are longer than 3min.
• Background posts.
• Image posts.
• Text posts.
• Posts made by a page linked to the group.
• Links (even if they are to another post on Facebook)

Disclaimer: While the above is a good rule of thumb, your type of group will determine what content performs best. Some of our groups are most keen on video, others prefer text posts, test what works best and see for yourself.

Use interactive posts

Facebook has specifically designed some features to promote interaction inside a group.

• Prompts ask members to add to a post by uploading their own pictures and contribute to the thread. These posts are good to ask members to share their own pictures.
• FAQ posts that allow members to ask you anything, work similarly to the Prompt posts and help push engagement in the right group.

Go live in your group

Facebook promotes videos (longer than 3 minutes) more than it promotes other types of content so going live in your group with content you know your members will love and engage with is a great way to promote engagement.

For example, you could run Q&A sessions, have an expert that is revered and respected in your community, talk about a controversial topic, etc.

Always ensure that you remind your members to turn notifications on for the next time you go live and to engage with the video so more members see it. Use powerful tools such as Streamyard to have guests come live with you, show comments and questions from the audience on screen and brand the video.

Publish posts that have high-engagement potential

Have you ever wondered why some posts get a lot of engagement and others don’t? This is because there is a formula that defines how likely a post is to evoke a reaction and we are about to unveil the secret below. Ready?

High-engagement potential posts are:

Easy to respond to

Don’t ask highly complicated questions, ask something everyone can easily answer, even from their phones like “Using a GIF tell us how you feel right now in the comments”, “share the first picture in your camera roll”, fill the blanks posts, Yes or No questions, Polls, etc.

Either or posts

Similar to the previous type of posts, either or posts offer an easy to respond question that encourages participation, especially if the post includes images or even memes.

Highly relatable posts

The most successful posts are those that most group members can identify with. They do not have to be directly related to the group’s topic but rather something that everyone can identify themselves with.

For example, a meme, a frustration or a realisation, a memory from their childhood, their favorite color, their favorite meal, a food they refuse to eat, etc.

Fun and entertaining

These kinds of posts promote engagement by also bringing in members who do not usually participate in the group commentary but who will read through the comments. Members clicking to expand comments helps tell the algorithm the post is of interest, in turn increasing engagement, even if they do not react to the post of the comments.

For example guessing games, funny stories, funny fails, stage names, silly photos, something you should know how to do but haven’t learned yet, something you can’t live without, etc.

Controversial posts

You need to be careful with controversial posts because they can also be time consuming to manage, but generally speaking, controversial posts that will get members to engage with passion can propel your engagement.

When we say controversial posts we mean those for which there are lots of opposing points of view and which will get people to express their opinion and to read everyone else’s comments.

A good example of that could be a post that starts with “My friend / husband / family thinks that XYZ but I always tells them that they are wrong and that ABC”.

Run a challenge

Sometime around the end of 2020, Facebook launched a new feature that took one of our group’s by the storm: challenges.

To activate a challenge, you simply need to create a hashtag that ends with the word “challenge” and Facebook will automatically add an icon with a cup to some posts, especially at the beginning of it, to make it clear to others they can use it too.

From then, every time a member uses the hashtag the cup icon will be added and all posts will be collected together under the hashtag. If you click on the hashtag you will see all the posts that have it, according to the privacy settings of the post.

What you need to know about Facebook Group challenges:

• Hashtags can be used outside your group by anyone so it might be worth it to choose a name that links back to your group to maintain visibility if the idea spreads.
• If the challenge really takes off, you could have a sudden and unexpected surge in posts in your group which could flood the feed, if you think it will be very successful, you should consider doing them when engagement is very low and turn post approval on so you can manage the feed.

Run a content

Running a contest can really increase your engagement, especially if you are raffling something that all your members would love to get their hands on. We have written everything about running contests on Facebook, but as a general rule of thumb, you need to make sure the prize is relevant a prized by your members and that is easy to run so that it does not increase your administrative burden.

Tag members in posts

Make your new members feel welcome and a part of the community by tagging them in a welcome post and publishing weekly welcome posts if applicable. You can automate all that with the help of Group Leads, our superpower and secret weapon.

Besides tagging new members, you can also tag members that you know are proficient or experts on a specific topic to prompt them to respond and contribute to a specific post, get the poster more answers and generally push engagement by connecting members.

Trial the new features

Facebook tends to promote every new feature they launch heavily at the beginning to encourage usage so if you try out the new roll outs at the start, you have a higher chance of pushing engagement.

Keep an eye out in our group for all the new product and feature roll outs, Facebook has been fast-tracking new features in the last few years. Because Solo Female Travelers is part of the Facebook Learning Labs group, Mar gets to be the first to find out about new tools and we always keep our members abreast of new developments.

Leave no question unanswered

Picture this. You join a group and when you post your first question (or your 9th) you get no answer to your question. Zilch, nothing, silence. How likely are you to post again? Especially if you are part of more than one group on a similar topic. Next time, you may post elsewhere instead.

As an Admin, you should make sure no question goes unanswered and monitor posts that have no meaningful responses so you can add your two cents. Google the answer if you don’t know it yourself, help out and make the poster feel like they got help, especially if they are new or the group is still small and doesn’t have enough experts on every field.

Allow controlled self-promotion

One of the fastest and easiest ways to push engagement is to run a self-promotion thread. Everyone loves to talk about themselves and if given the chance they will most likely participate, but make sure you stipulate the rules (if any) and the restrictions for this.

For example, our self-promotional threads do not allow MLM or other pyramid schemes, they require affiliate relationships be disclosed and remind members not to direct message anyone unless they have been explicitly given permission to.

Pro tip: instead of running a self-promotion thread, consider running a pay it forward thread where people can offer their services or help for free, anything goes. These are even better because even those who wouldn’t have anything to promote or who don’t like to, can offer their help with anything.

Understand what type of content does best

Head over to Group Insights and look at the most popular posts in the last 30 days and try to understand what type of content your members like and engaged with the most, then replicate that. You can even schedule the same type of post every few months. As your group grows, answers to the same post will vary.