Having a Facebook Page, attracting droves of people to Like it, and sharing content with them shouldn’t be the only tricks up your brand’s corporate sleeves. While the number of followers or Likes you have still play a significant role in gauging your online marketing progress, they won’t put much value into your online reputation and branding efforts. You may have a gazillion followers but if none of them are really paying attention, all your efforts may be for naught.

In this day and age of the interactive social Interwebs, you’ll need to grab your followers’ attention, and engage with them on a regular basis. These can help solidify your brand’s relationship with its followers, and earn both their trust and loyalty. And by setting up your Facebook Page, you provide your followers with an open platform where they can interact with your brand, and with each other. Here are three ways you can generate and boost interactions on your brand’sFacebook Page.

Share Fresh, Valuable Content

Sharing links to your own content on your brand’s Facebook page has become one of the most common ways you can create a seamless ecosystem where your followers can experience your brand. While some of them may interact with your through your site’s comment sections, others will choose to instead leave comments on your Facebook profile.

• Link to your own content.
  This links up your Web site and blogs to your various social profiles, and gives you multiple opportunities to engage with them, and to boost your sites’ traffic. The important thing to remember here is to create content that will inherently be interesting, helpful, and unique. It’ll also help if you install Facebook social plugins into your Web site to make it easier for people to share your content online.
• Link to other people’s content.
  Your brand’s Facebook Page doesn’t have to exclusively be just for your content. Sometimes, it’s OK to share other people’s write-ups and videos. If you find a really interesting post, footages and artworks related to your industry, or even a joke you know that’ll crack up your followers, share those with them. It can create more interaction opportunities for you.

Be an Active, Contributing Member of Your Community

Continuously pushing content to your followers can be dull and even spammy, two of many factors a brand online can be deemed unappealing to Facebook users. Instead, be an active member of your society and join in on activities and conversations.

Image by stevendepolo

• Initiate and Join Conversations
  Conversations can bring out opinions and help build camaraderie among individuals. In brand marketing, this helps develop your brand’s identity with an actual human personality that’s easy to approach and relate with.
• Respond to Comments
  Reply to other people’s comments, agree or disagree with their opinions, and share your own two cents. These are great ways to acknowledge your followers, telling them that yes, you are paying attention, and listening in closely to what they have to say because they matter.
• Participate in Shenanigans
  Break away from your brand’s corporate image and have fun with your demographic. The most engaged brands online have fun with their followers, sharing inside jokes, funny anecdotes, and Web comics with each other. These are awesome ways to start and keep organic conversations going. This should be consistent whether you’re chatting them up online, or during offline events.
• Personally Address the People You’re Talking To
  When interacting with people on your Facebook Page, always directly address the people you are talking to; either by mentioning their name or even @tagging them. This helps them know who you’re talking to, tells them that they have your attention, and it can even branch out into more engagement opportunities.

Give Stuff Away

Offering your followers the chance to win something from you can be an awesome way to encourage and motivate interactions on Facebook. For starters, contests and promotions can create quite a good buzz online. And depending on the nature of your promotion, or the prize your brand is offering, it can provide you with better chances of getting people to pile into your Facebook Page to Like it, or to your Web site to join and boost traffic (should you decide on holding a larger contest and host it on your own domain). Here are a few ideas for contests to boost engagements.

• Tell people to Like your Facebook Page or one of your status messages, and then use a randomizing app to choose a winner / winners. The more prizes you offer, the more opportunities they will have. This increases your targeted audience, engagement opportunities and your follower base.
• Post a photo and ask people to add a funny caption to it via the comment section. Here, you can emblazon every entry onto your photo, put them into a photo album, and have people vote on which one is the funniest.
• Do a little crowdsourcing and give them a theme or a scenario to Photoshop or write a short story about. Because this requires time and efforts, it’ll be better if you offer a more valuable prize. Photoshopped entries can be put on an album on the Page while text-based entries can be hosted on your Web site.

Tags: Content Marketing, Facebook, Linking, Social Engagements, social media marketing, social networks