How do you drive engagement on Facebook? Post ideas that get your customers reacting.

Social media managers spend a lot of time puzzling over how to get an audience engaged on the fan pages they run. Building a bond with fans is, after all, one of the basic reasons for having a page at all.

Building an engaged community around a brand matters a great deal, both for the company's image and for sales. Positive associations with a business are, in the end, what pushes people to buy. To build that bond with fans, it pays to plan communication that leaves room for posts inviting discussion, reactions, or a private message. Below are a few types of post that make fans more likely to interact. It has to be stressed here as well how important that interaction is. When you decide to run engaging posts, remember to keep an eye on the comments and answer them as they come in.

Riddles and puzzles

A graphic with an element of mystery in it grabs attention. That gives you a real shot at interaction. On the fan pages we run, we use posts like these to make information about the brand and its services stick, through a simple game. With Oryginalny Sok, a Polish juice brand, this riddle told us what consumers expected from new juices, and let us introduce a new product in a creative way.

Another example of an engaging post on that fan page was a creative contest with an educational bent. To take part, you had to go looking for information about the brand on social media and on its website.

On the Worldline Polska fan page we build awareness of what payment terminals can do. Every so often we run “wheel of fortune” puzzles — we ask our fans to fill in the missing squares and guess the phrase. If you get an audience involved in learning about a brand or a product, the information sticks around longer.

Posts built on wordplay

A post that can be read two ways is often the key to success! Season it with humor on top of that and you can be confident your fans will like what you publish. They will be glad to come back to the fan page and leave a mark. On the Produkty Cukiernicze BRZEŚĆ page — a Polish confectionery maker — the posts work like a comic strip with a short dialogue, and the characters are the brand's own products, personified. The creative approach and the wordplay paid off in more engagement: since we introduced this kind of communication we have seen a 15 percent increase. One thing worth mentioning: this is a page where we only promote posts occasionally.

Real-time marketing (RTM) posts

It pays to react to events a large group of people care about and to reference them creatively in your own communication. Putting two very different industries together often produces something interesting, and the discussion that reference sets off matters a great deal. The brand gets remembered as one that follows current trends and is up to date, which feeds into converting fans into the brand's actual customers.

Our nod to the premiere of the final season of “Game of Thrones” fired up even the ice-cream crowd (ice, meet fire), and not only them — it was picked out by the editors of the magazine Nowy Marketing as one of the more interesting pieces of creative referencing the event.

Voting with reactions, and questions that engage

One of the most common ways to get fans interacting is voting with reactions and asking questions. Keep in mind that discussion comes from topics most of your fans have a stake in. With posts on the Vobis.pl page — a Polish electronics retailer — we move around electronics and how people use them. Put the key questions side by side the right way and the fans speak up. It is worth adding that posts like these not only tell us more about what our audience prefers, they also let us “smuggle in” industry content, fixing an expert image in people's minds. Which means a fan will get in touch not only to buy a product but for advice and consultation, and that is how we build a long-term relationship with them.

Engaging through inspiration

Attractive, inspiring graphics are content an audience always likes. Fans are keen to comment on posts like these and share their own ideas. There are harder industries, obviously, but almost any of them can inspire its fans. Food can inspire with recipes and flavors, construction with interiors, fashion with styling, and so on. And remember that we can inspire people not only to look and admire but to act, by slipping in simple tips or pointers. Content like that is added value and rounds out the communication. That way, fans will want to drop by our fan page to pick up new tips and bring them into their own lives. And isn't that exactly what a brand dreams of? Having a real influence on behavior and being present in its customers' lives?

Engaging and substantive

Substantive, educational communication can engage plenty of people too. Especially when the subject is pets, which are — as everyone knows — the internet's favorites. For our client, the Aquael group, we build communication around posts about different species of animal and how to look after them properly. The group holds three brands: Comfy, Aquael ZOO and Aquael. The last of these makes aquarium equipment and gathers people who are passionate about the underwater world. So the fans expect the brand not only to tell them about the newest products but to bring new information about their hobby into their lives. On top of publishing image and educational posts, checked by Aquael's subject-matter team, we also introduced the #ZostanEkspertemAquael series — Become an Aquael Expert. In it, micro-influencers write how-to pieces on a topic we agree together and we publish them as posts. In return our experts get small gifts: heaters, filters and the like. Even though the posts are unusually long by Facebook standards, fans read them eagerly, comment on them and… ask for more! Which only proves that certain general rules (the ones about keeping posts short, for instance) do not always hold, and that a communication strategy always has to be fitted to the target audience. The post below runs to almost… 3,000 characters! It still picked up over 200 reactions, 10 comments and 9 shares. And the comments had no shortage of extra information from the fans.

Remember that strong engagement on a fan page is something that satisfies not only the people writing the communication but the fans as well — and with them, the end customers who will use the product or service.