Facebook was one of the first true social media platforms, and it’s also one of the most interesting to watch. With the rise of newer apps like TikTok, many companies have heard whispers that it’s time to jump off the Facebook ship, but we couldn’t disagree more.
Our 2024 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report found that the overall average engagement rate on Facebook was 0.06%, which is on par with our findings for our latest study. This stagnancy might make you think that Facebook isn’t growing, but that’s not entirely true. According to Statista, the number of Facebook users in the U.S. is expected to continue to increase between 2024 and 2028 by a whopping 12.6 million users.
Over the next few years, you’ll have a wealth of new users to target, which can help you boost your engagement rates. However, to reach those new Facebook users, you’ll likely need to bring your Facebook strategy into 2024. Let’s talk about today’s best tactics to increase your Facebook engagement.
8 Tactics to Boost Facebook Engagement
1. Test and reinvest
This list is filled with new ways to engage your target audience, but it’s essential to understand that your audience is unique to you. What engages them is specific to them. While these tactics can be a great place to start when you want to improve your Facebook strategy, the best way to optimize that blueprint is to test and reinvest.
Find out what is a good engagement rate on Facebook. 
Social media analytics tools are built around the concept of finding what works for you. Testing new ideas requires you to analyze your results and see if those ideas are worth continuing to put in place. Otherwise, you’re just constantly trying something new, even if a previous tactic was working well. When you make social media marketing choices based on the analytics in tools like Rival IQ, you’ll be more likely to see whether or not your engagement is heading in the right direction.
Rival IQ also gives you the additional benefit of allowing you to learn from your competitors. Our dashboard lets you see how you stack up in your industry, helping you keep tabs on your competitors.
You can see where you land in terms of your engagement rate, such as in this chart that takes a look at top brands in skincare, or even dive deeper into the specific strategies your rivals have implemented. You can also glean helpful insights into your own accounts, like your best time to post.
2. Keep your audience updated
People use Facebook for a variety of reasons, but one of the most popular draws to the app is keeping up to date on news. According to DataPortal’s research, staying on top of news is the third most prominent reason people turn to Facebook, only beaten out by talking to friends and family and sharing their own posts.
One of our top healthy food brands on Facebook, Beyond Meat, found success by following a formula of using Facebook to address product and company news. The plant-based meat alternative’s Facebook feed is filled with informative content, from new releases to partnerships to discussions of their nutritional value and positive environmental impact.
One of the brand’s top Facebook posts of 2023 by engagement rate was an announcement that its Beyond Popcorn Chicken is now available at Sam’s Club and its Beyond Steak is in select Costco locations. The post is relatively simple, with an image of Beyond Popcorn Chicken inside a Sam’s Club freezer. The Facebook post also offered a link to help people locate where to find retailers with Beyond Meat products.
The post earned an engagement rate of 1.31%, about 44x the average engagement rate for the food and beverage industry in 2024. The success of the post goes to show how Facebook users want to see content that is informative and allows them to stay on top of what’s happening with their favorite brands.
3. Provide value
Keeping your audience up to date on company news is one way to provide value to your followers, but there are more options for creating content that’s helpful to your fans. Offering content that provides value is beneficial to your content strategy for multiple reasons.
For one thing, posts that offer high-quality information may be more likely to be saved, which can mean that your followers save and return to the post multiple times. The more times they view the content, the more chances you’ll have to receive engagement on it.
Take, for instance, one tactic by Rare Beauty. The Selena Gomez-founded makeup company topped our list of the best beauty brands on Facebook. Among the brand’s top posts of 2023 by engagement rate were what Rare Beauty dubbed #RareRoutines. These types of posts showcased the founder and a makeup look, with the caption spelling out what products were used to achieve the design.
This type of content not only provides value for people who want to replicate the look but they also offer the brand a platform to promote their products. If someone were to want the exact same look as Gomez, they would need several of Rare Beauty’s makeup products. One of the brand’s top #RareRoutines of 2023 earned an engagement rate of 1.9%, 95x the average engagement rate of the health and beauty industry on Facebook in 2024.
4. Create engaging visuals
In both 2023 and 2024’s Social Media Industry Benchmark Reports, sports teams reigned as the industry with the highest engagement rates on Facebook. So, how have they held the title year after year? One tactic many sports teams have leaned on is the use of engaging visuals.
When Facebook first took over the social media scene, it was a space for photo sharing. You could keep friends up to date on your life by showcasing snapshots of it. As time has gone on, Facebook’s face has changed quite a bit, but photo sharing remains a great way to boost your engagement.
According to our Social Media Industry Benchmark Report, photos were far and away the posts with the highest average engagement rate for sports teams, garnering over 0.25%. In comparison, status updates alone only received just under 0.14% as an average engagement rate. One team that demonstrated the success of photo posts was the NHL team the New Jersey Devils.
The Devils posted 916 photos throughout 2023, but they didn’t just post still images. Many of their photos were covered in graphics that supplied vital information for fans, such as final game scores, players’ stats, and how many games won by the Devils in a series.
One of the top images in terms of engagement rate in 2023 was a photo dedicated to Akira Schmid. The post shared that he’d had his first playoff shutout, which means that the goalie blocked every shot on goal. The post earned an engagement rate of 2.85%, 9.5x the average engagement rate of the sports industry on Facebook.
5. Focus on quality over quantity
In our Social Media Industry Benchmark Report, we found that industries that posted the most didn’t necessarily have the best engagement rates. The industry that posted the most, media, posted an average of 73.5 times per week. However, the media also tied for the third-lowest average engagement rate at 0.04%.
Sports teams posted the second most often and scored the highest engagement rate. Meanwhile, influencers posted just 4.2 times per week, one of the lowest posting frequencies, and still managed to secure the second-highest average engagement rate.
While we recommend keeping a consistent posting schedule, how often you should post can vary by your audience and industry. SKKN BY KIM and Kylie Cosmetics landed as third and eighth, respectively, on our list of the best beauty brands on Facebook. However, they had vastly different posting schedules. Between January 1, 2023, and December 31, 2023, SKKN BY KIM posted 340 times, or about 6.5 posts per week. Meanwhile, Kylie Cosmetics posted 560 times, or about 11 posts per week.
SKKN BY KIM’s engagement rate during 2023 averaged 0.63%, but Kylie Cosmetics averaged 0.019%, meaning that SKKN BY KIM outperformed the latter brand by over 33x. Both brands followed the recommended advice of keeping a regular posting schedule, but it’s clear that more factors are at play when it comes to gaining higher engagement than just post quantity.
6. Try out boosting
According to HubSpot’s research, Facebook remains the platform with the highest return on investment (ROI), tied for first with Instagram. It’s no wonder why the software company also found that Facebook continues to be the most popular platform used by marketers. It’s also no wonder why we’re seeing that more and more companies are giving boosting a try.
Boosted posts are essentially ads that are created from existing posts on your Facebook Page, and they can be a great way to dip your toes into advertising on Facebook. Winter sportswear brand Atomic saw great success when they tried out boosting, as evident by the fact that they wound up topping our list of the best outdoor brands on Facebook.
Five of the company’s top 10 Facebook posts for 2023 were boosted, including the brand’s top post of the year by engagement rate. The post, which celebrated Atomic partner Mikaela Shiffrin’s new record of the most World Cup wins of any skier in history, scored an engagement rate of 14.3%, about 358x the average engagement rate of the retail industry in 2024.
7. Use community-driven UGC
There are many benefits to using user-generated content (UGC) on social media. For starters, it’s a time-saver and a money-saver. Shooting content in-house can take a great deal of time. If you need to rent a studio or equipment, you could be looking at a high monetary investment, too. As we recommend keeping a consistent posting schedule, you’ll need to have a high amount of content on hand to ensure you’re keeping to the number of photos or videos you want to post per week.
UGC saves you time and money, but it can also help you gain trust with your followers. UGC has been shown to feel more authentic to your audience, which may help you drive sales more than in-house content. However, marketing platform TINT’s State of Community Powered Marketing Report for 2024 dove deeper into that idea, finding that audiences are more likely to leave UGC or engage with UGC if they feel like they’re part of a community.
The study found that 82% of people explore new products through communities and that brands with dedicated communities are more likely to drive ROI and be viewed more positively. Diamond Pet Foods, which won as our best pet brand on Facebook, has been focusing on building their community for quite some time.
Many of the brand’s top posts by engagement rate for 2023 were UGC collected from the company’s Fan Family Program. The Fan Family Program asks fans to send in photos and videos for a chance to be featured on Diamond’s social media channels. These photos, like this one of two snuggly sleeping dogs, make up a large portion of the brand’s social media. This photo earned Diamond an engagement rate of 37.5%, about 938x the average engagement rate for the retail industry on Facebook in 2024.
For another way to start building a community of your fans, try out a Facebook Group. Facebook reported that more than 1.8 billion people use Facebook Groups, with NYU’s The Governance Lab finding that people reported feeling a strong sense of community in these groups despite the lack of physical proximity.
8. Optimize your post for search
Picture a search engine. Your mind likely immediately wanders to Google’s iconic search bar, but these days, a search engine can exist in many places, including on social media. TINT’s 2023 State of Social & User-Generated Content Report found that nearly 76% of social media users have used social platforms’ search functions to find new products or ideas.
As we move into the new year, it’s vital for companies to optimize their content for search, starting with search-optimized keywords. Consider, for example, how baking brand King Arthur Baking writes their captions.
The brand utilizes keywords like “gluten-free” or “no sugar added” to describe their recipe posts, making their content more easily discoverable through Facebook’s search function. If someone were to look up gluten-free or no-sugar recipes, they’d be directed to King Arthur Baking’s posts.
One of the brand’s top posts by engagement rate for 2023 was a recipe for a peanut butter cake, and the caption specifically used the words “peanut butter cake recipe.” If someone were to look up those words, the search function would have an easy time redirecting them to this post. Perhaps that’s why the post earned an engagement rate of 0.36%, 12x the average engagement rate of the food and beverage industry on Facebook in 2024.
Wrapping Up Facebook Engagement Strategies
Facebook has stood the test of time, and it’s only expected to grow in the next few years. With new users comes the opportunity for more engagement, but it may be time to switch up your strategy.
Search-optimized keywords, a good posting schedule, and boosted posts can help you reach more people, while news, value-driven posts, and UGC can help you keep their attention. When you’re not sure where to go, try testing and analyzing what’s worth reinvesting in.
Looking for more engagement help? Check out our guides to increasing engagement on Instagram and Twitter.
