As a rough and ready measurement, the Facebook Like is quite handy. But just like someone who once signed up for your email newsletter, but who never now reads it, the Like doesn’t necessarily represent a person who is actively engaged with your content. If you want to increase the impact your FB page is having on people’s behaviour then read these tips for leaving the Likes behind and concentrating instead on engagement.

What is ‘engagement’? In a nutshell, it’s a change in somebody’s behaviour caused by your organisation’s message, online content, campaign or activities. If you can get people who visit your FB page to come to an event, use your services, or donate money to your cause, then they have engaged with you. A study of 500 consumers reported in Mashable suggests that half of the people studied were prompted to take some real-world action because of content they had seen or shared online. Interestingly, Facebook was found to be the biggest driver of these actions – including prompting the greatest number of donations to a charity or cause. (You can find out more about the ‘Beyond the Click’ survey here).

So, engagement is a good thing, but how do you move your page visitors on from merely Liking to actively engaging? Luckily there are some tips out there which could help.

First up, the The Non Profit Facebook Guy has produced this handy graphic to explain how people’s relationship with your page can gradually become more active:

The Guy’s POV is that it is ‘trust and affinity’ with your organisation’s aims and content that will power somebody up the ladder of engagement… but he also notes we shouldn’t expect that everybody will make it to the top.  Read more about the ladder, here.

Another post from The Non Profit Facebook Guy gives six steps (and an infographic) for helping people climb that ladder, ranging from posting frequently, replying quickly to comments, and using images – and asking for shares or likes doesn’t hurt either.

For a very interesting discussion about what makes the best content to boost engagement, read a precis of the panel discussion from the AllFacebook Marketing Conference held earlier this month: you can find the summary here. While the panelists were divided about the importance of producing specific types of content for your page (photos, paid ads, etc) they were united in stressing the need for quality posts, regular posts and posts that are relevant to your local audiences.

More useful advice about improving the quality of your page has also come out of the Conference: read these six tips here.

Lastly, some research undertaken by US National Public Radio and reported in All Facebook suggests that there are nine types of posts that engage visitors with their storytelling:

Put all this together and what do you have? Creating high quality content for our FB pages, content that is relevant, frequent, authentic and which incorporates calls to action, will help move our visitors from passive Likers to engaged and active supporters of our causes.

Well, that’s easy… now all we need to do is to do it!