When discussing Facebook, “Engagement” is a very popular term, as it’s how we measure the success of a post. The more activity and interaction a post has the more successful it is for the business.

Now this concept of measuring engagement in recent months has become more and more popular as brands and businesses start to question the returns social media generates. Obviously any advertising platform needs to achieve measurable results, and at this point it seems “engagement” is the key metric for social media.

The question then becomes what kind of posts generate engagement? Facebook allows you to do text, video and image posts, not only that but you can do pinned posts and highlighted posts. Recently they’ve also introduced the concept of promoted posts where you can pay for greater reach.

With all these different kinds of posts it can be tough as a business owner to work out what kind of posts generate the most engagement. Don’t worry though, you’re not the first business owner worried about this, so I’ve decided to share some tips on how to get the highest engagement on your posts.

As an Internet marketing consultant I spend a lot of time strategizing with companies and also reviewing competitors campaigns. In my experience and research here are some of the key elements to a post that gets great engagement:

Key Element #1: Type Of Post

There are 3 major post types, images, text and video. In my research and experience image posts have achieved the greatest results. As Facebook is a visual platform users generally engage more with pictures, so use this to your advantage. Post images of your customers, images of your products and images of your team.

Key Element #2: Content Of Post

When posting on Facebook it’s important to ensure the content of your post is something which your readers are interested in. Over the last few months, the types of posts I’ve seen get most engagement are the “Like If” style posts. For example “Like This Image If You Wear Prada On The Weekend”. This kind of post entices the fan to like the post and can also help with customer demographics research.

Key Element #3: Timing Of Post

There are lots of articles scattered around the web which talk about the “best times” to post. Ultimately each market and industry is different, for example a bar may be best to post in the evenings where a café in the mornings.

As a rule of thumb, choose post timings that meet your current client behaviors, for example if you are busy in the morning then post in the morning.

Now this is by no means an extensive list, in fact I could go on for quite some time, but these 3 elements will help you to spike engagement with your fans. Leave a comment below of what you believe are other key elements for enticing engagement.