8 Tips For Increasing Engagement On Facebook Status Updates Using Photos

by | Jan 19, 2012 | Blogging, Facebook, Google+, Social Media Platforms, Top Tips, Twitter, Website & Blog | 0 comments

Looking to increase the engagement on your Facebook status updates? It seems that study after study are telling us that photos are the number one type of content that people engage with on Facebook. You can see the data related to some these studies at: 
This comes as no surprise to me, as I often skim my Facebook news feed and am drawn to visual images over text. In addition to this, I often don’t click on video links as I either don’t have the time to watch them, might be in an environment where playing audio is not appropriate or am not sure of the relevance of the content from the title and screen shot provided. Some people may also be concerned of their download limits when streaming video, particularly if using a mobile device. So now you know that photos create greater engagement, how can you incorporate this into your Facebook posting strategy? Impactiv8 is here to help, with 8 handy tips for making it easier to use photos to increase engagement on Facebook.

1. Source photos in advance

It takes time to source photos that are interesting, of decent quality, relevant to the content you are posting on, likely to engage discussion and most importantly – royalty-free so that this strategy doesn’t end up costing you a fortune!  However, more than likely you talk about the same topics on a regular basis.  What are they?  Write down you top 8 topics and then start building a bank of images relevant to those topics for future use as appropriate.  I try to do this at least once a month (or whenever I don’t have that perfect image for a particular post).  Here are some of the royalty-free photo I sites I use (NOTE: some provide a selection of free images to search from):

Just make sure that if you use a free image that you publish a credit to the digital artist who created it.  In most cases if you are unwilling or unable to publish a credit, then you must purchase the image to avoid this requirement.

2. Find a great picture and then write a post around that

What came first, the chicken of the egg?  Don’t just search for images to match to your posts – consider the reverse. When you come across an engaging image that might be off topic, think of a post that might suit the image. Sometimes an image that might not necessarily seem relevant to your industry can create excellent engagement levels if you put a quirky spin on it to make it relevant to your industry.

3. Take your camera (or camera phone) everywhere you go

Facebook status updates engagementMore than likely you come in contact with your products, services, clients, business tools or examples of your work in some capacity everyday.  Make sure you capture images that reflect this as you go.  That way, rather than having a photo of some random presenter with a pointer looking at a flip chart to support your next post featuring a funny story that happened during a pitch you were giving that day, get someone to take a photo of you next time you are presenting and store it away in your image bank for use during a time like this.  People build a relationship with you on Facebook, not that random guy, so you are more likely to get engagement if you are featured in the image that supports your post.

4. Modify your images

It’s amazing what a difference something as simple as a border can make to an image at times.  Combining images, applying an effect and adding text can completely transform an image and increase engagement levels.  The great news is that it can be a lot simpler than you think.  There are soooo many tools available these days that provide you with countless ways to make your images look more interesting.  My favourites are the basic ones that cost little (or nothing) and require minimal effort and training.  Check out How To Edit Photos With Ease To Make Them More Interesting And Engaging to discover my secrets for achieving this.

5. Invest in some professional images

If you are looking to create a professional image for your business, then you will need some professional images to support this.  If you are getting professional images of yourself for use on your social media platforms, then do some planning and make the most of your studio time.  Don’t just get a head and shoulders shot of yourself looking smart and sensible, inject some personality into your images.  Take a variety of poses and expressions – these can be used to express emotions in your posts.  Take some props (e.g. your products or everyday business tools) with you and photograph yourself in action with them as well as photographing them by themselves to feature on your Facebook page.  It may be the beginning of the year, but why not take along a santa hat, bunny ears and a pumpkin.  Saves you the time and expense later in the year, whilst maintaining a consistently professional look throughout the year.

6. Include thumbnail images in all of your blog posts

Facebook and some other social media and content sharing platforms pull a photo from the URL of any articles you link to from outside sources. You can capitalise on this by making sure that all of your blog posts include an interesting and engaging image that is relevant to the content of the post. This will increase the likelihood of people clicking on the link when you (or others) share you content on Facebook.

7. Turn your words into images

Wordle example for Facebook page updates Sometimes there just isn’t an image to match your post (or you just don’t have time to find it).  Thankfully Wordle has come up with a solution for these exact moments.
Wordle generates “word clouds” from text that you provide.  The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.  You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.  The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like.
A simple solution is to put all the words from your status update straight into this on-line tool and presto you have an image! You can change the language, font, layout and colour as appropriate to your needs or branding, although I must admit that the colour scheme and font selection is limited.

8. Include a call to action

share photos from other pages
Don’t just include a photo and hope for the best.  Include a specific call for action. Openly encouraging your fans to “like”, “leave a comment”, “share” or “tag” your image to increase engagement.  These actions will increase the virility of your post and increase the number of people that are talking about your Facebook page.  Asking people to tag their friends in one of your images is particularly effective, as it increases the reach of your post to the friend that is being tagged (and all of their friends via the ticker) provided they have enabled tagging in their preferences.  One way of achieving this is by including several of your products in the one image and asking people to tag the friend that they feel is most likely to use each of your products.

Example

Like pictures on other pages, Now you don’t have to use all the tips everytime you post.  Here is a simple example of some of these tips being put in action with minimal effort to provide great results in the early days of developing a Facebook page.  I posted this status update (pictured right) including an image on Impactiv8’s page when it only had 112 page “likes” and the “talking about this” metric was low after not posting a lot over the holiday period.  The aim of this update was to entice people to interact and therefore return my engagement levels to their usual high levels. I already had this image of someone pushing the “like” button on an iPad on file from when I had previously sourced social media images from freedigitalphotos.net, so all I had to do was to think of a post to match the image that included a call to action. I kept the call to action simple by requesting a “like” and kept the reason for liking quite broad “if you own or would like to own an iPad” (now isn’t that pretty much everyone?). Incorporating another one of the above tips, I am now using this image as the thumbnail for this blog as I already know that my audience is interested and can be engaged by this image.
This status managed to reach 64 people (remember only 112 people liked the page at the time), have 18 “people talking about this” and received 16% engagement.  Now whilst I would love to have a minimum of this level of engagement on all my posts, I also acknowledge that these aren’t massive (viral) results.  However, considering it took me a total of about 30seconds to find the picture, think of an appropriate call to action and post I am more than happy with that result.  I used a combination of the other tips in the following days and within four days engagement had increased to 40% and page likes were up to 140.  So like all things in social media, consistency is the key.
Have you implemented any of these strategies with success?  Tell us about it in the comments below.  If not, give them a try and let us know how you get on.  Also, feel free to share this post with anyone you know that is trying to create more engagement on their Facebook Page.  They are sure to thank you for it!

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