12 Secrets Revealed on Simple Ways to Find Engaging Facebook Content

Do you find yourself digging through the news headlines or trending topics to try and find targets for your next Facebook post?

The best thing to do is create an outline or guideline for your own use to stay on track and maintain a theme. That way you always have targets in mind and are not just randomly looking for something of interest. It is really important to provide content that your “friends” are already interested in. This will not only keep them reading but coming back. An easy way to do this is to look around at who your “friends” are following and what topics are trending with them. You can also add in a survey asking about their biggest problems so you can turn around and provide a solution or hold a contest to promote further engagement and create a connection.

Check out these 12 secret tips on how to find the most engaging content for your friends and followers:

How to Find Engaging Content for Facebook Posts #1: Customer Feedback: Listen to your customer, find out what they want, and provide it to them. Yeah, that’s kind of marketing 101 in a nutshell, but it works – even when you’re looking for Facebook post content. Check your Facebook customer posts and comments, check your customer email, check your Twitter mentions. What are your customers asking you, what are they commenting on and what are they posting? Use these as a source of inspiration – they are your target market after all. Make Facebook posts answering their questions (briefly), or addressing topics your Fans are commenting on.

How to Find Engaging Content for Facebook Posts #2: Monitor Competition (and You): Another great way to find engaging content is to watch your competition. Make a list of 5-20 of your competitors, check out their Facebook Pages on a regular basis. You can try to be like them, and post similar content to their most popular posts. Make your posts slightly different, keeping your company brand and consumer in mind. Or, take note of what they’re posting and how well their marketing themes are in engaging customers – and then do something different.

How to Find Engaging Content for Facebook Posts #3: Track Relevant Hashtags: Make a list of brand, product and lifestyle related hashtags. Monitor these keywords on your social sites. Track the hashtags on Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and now on Facebook too. On Pinterest, for example, you can find some great sources of inspiration for images of lifestyle posts. If your Facebook strategy includes, say, posts about household tips – search and monitor Pinterest for great ideas on #householdtips, #householdtricks and #houseworktips.

How to Find Engaging Content for Facebook Posts #4: Follow Inspiring People and Companies: In addition to tracking hashtags on your favourite social sites, follow the people and brands that post inspiring updates about topics related to your business. These brands could include your competitors, your customers, and even potential business partners. Tip: If your source is your customer or potential friendly partner, a good practice is to mention them in your post, or at least mention them when you are cross-promoting your Facebook post.

How to Find Engaging Content for Facebook Posts #6: Subscribe to Industry-specific Blogs: I’d highly recommend using this practice whether it’s for Facebook Post inspiration, or any other type of content. Make a list of 10-20 industry specific blog posts. Check them out, by reading a few of their posts and see what they do as a company. If the posts fit with your Facebook content strategy, subscribe to their blogs. I’d recommend using a reader feed. This keeps your email less clogged, and you can organize your reading material a lot better in a cloud-based reader than through an emailed one. Yes, I’m still missing Google Reader (which closed July 1) a bit, but fortunately there’s a lot of great alternatives.

How to Find Engaging Content for Facebook Posts #7: Subscribe to Lifestyle-related Blogs: Does your Facebook content strategy include a lot of lifestyle postings? Then repeat step #6, above, but subscribe to your target market’s lifestyle related blogs. Again, make a list of 10-20 related blogs (search for them on google, or technorati). Create a news feed for them, using a reader. Regularly reading your personalized lifestyle news will give you tons of inspiration for your business Facebook updates. (Just try to NOT spend too much time reading it everyday! Posting to Facebook is your work, and you do need to keep focused!)

How to Find Engaging Content for Facebook Posts #8: Use Niche Social Sites: Find inspiration through social sites that cater to your business niche. You likely know your niche social sites for your industry (more than I do). Stay connected with them, and use them for Facebook page inspiration. A few more general niche sites (is that really a term these days?) include the classics likeReddit, and newer sharing sites like Snapguide, slideshare and prezi. Find ideas and inspiration from these particular sites. Explore niche social sites in your industry too. Again, you can always include the source in your Facebook post, to give a shout out to the original poster.

How to Find Engaging Content for Facebook Posts #9: Add Contests and Promotions: Contests and social promotions are an amazing way to increase engagement on your Facebook Page – and they give you tons of content options. There’s loads of types of contests you can run through Facebook. Whether you have a big budget for prizes, or you have little to no budget for prizes, contests make great posts. Contests, coupons and sweepstakes also generate tons of engagement for your Page – and your business.

How to Find Engaging Content for Facebook Posts #10: Use Pre-made Meme’s, or Make Your Own: Another great tip to finding engaging content is to add meme’s to your Facebook updates. Meme’s are super popular, and can get you lots of likes, shares and comments. They are numerous sites that you can use to make your own meme. You can make them in a matter of minutes. Many of these sites are free, and shareable. That means if you’re really at a loss for creative posting – check out some of the meme’s already made. Share them on your Facebook page.

How to Find Engaging Content for Facebook Posts #11: Get Inspiring Quotes from Websites and Social sites: Inspiring quotes are very engaging content, too. You can add them to a meme, another image, or just post them as a plain quote. Finding quotes is not that hard. There are a myriad of free websites that specialize in publishing quotes. If you are looking for more classic quotes, check out Bartleby.com’s selection of books of quotations. It includes twelve books, such as the well stocked Bartlett’s Book of Quotations (this link alone has over 11,000 quotes)

How to Find Engaging Content for Facebook Posts #12: Search for Images: Images are some of the most shared content on Facebook. In fact, they get 53% more likes than the average post, and 104% more comments than the non-imaged update. So where do you find great images? If you don’t have an internal bank of images for your business Facebook page, don’t panic. There are many really simple ways to get them that you can use for your updates. A really simple, and effective way to get visuals is to use Google Images. Let Google crawl the internet to find you the perfect jpeg or png for your updates. Try out a variety of searches if at first you don’t find the visual you need.