No engagement growth for a while. How would you switch things up?

Facebook is tough right now! 💚

A lot depends on your goals and target audience. Where/what do they want to see on Facebook - if at all. Gotta give the people what they want. Hopefully your leadership is open to learning about your social audience insights.

My number one advice - don’t rely on Facebook. 🤷🏼😅 If you have capacity, definitely explore using your content on another channel. My first recommendation would be LinkedIn for a non-profit, great growth and engagement right now.

Number two, try posting similar content in video and other formats, single image, carousel, etc. Find out what really works best for your audience. Document and present results to your leadership. I would do the same with caption copy style, too - maybe you could use a refresh there to get your audience’s attention again.

Number three, use some budget to help get engagement/growth with my core audiences. If I was working with a non-profit that didn’t have a regular events/programming situation, I would use some of my spend on followers, or “followers + people like them” to promote my regular content.

I went into the Sprout reports for the art museum (14K likes | 15K followers) I work for to look at our best performing Facebook content over the past two years if you’re looking for content ideas. We get a lot of content with engagements in the range you’re describing for videos on Facebook. 😕 

• Behind the Scenes - providing a look into what your non-profit does, recognizing employees/partners.
• Short videos (60 secs vertical, originally made for TikTok/Reels) - videos can be hit or miss, but focus energy on those areas that your core audience loves - so they comment/share it! For our museum, these are Deep Dives on Collection items or Artist talks where they explain a particular work or provide some insight into its development. Experiment with post to Feed/FB Reels to see what works for you.
  • One note, we’ve seen improving success with video over a long period - at least a year of consistent content made social first. Here and there ‘fun’ videos aren’t a strategy - leaders need education here. We have a documented social strategy that outlines our goals, content pillars, post types, ideal balance, competitor info, etc. which drives all of our content creation, video is just a part of that.
• Make good (recurring) use of ‘bread and butter’ content - we have some objects, artists, etc. that are big hits with our existing audience and we use that to our advantage. Sometimes you really don’t need to think outside the box.
• Celebration posts of institution news like new staff, fundraising success, press stories, etc.
• We have a particularly beautiful campus so we can never go wrong with a nice exterior shot! It’s frustrating, but sometimes these are the most reliable high-performers on Facebook.

We boost almost every single public event individually, and also run paid campaigns year round to support exhibitions and programming. Ongoing commitment to spend (even if its small) + valuable content will help grow/engage your audience over time.