At Funeral Innovations, we help funeral homes succeed on Facebook. One critically important step for succeeding on Facebook is engaging your audience. The more you engage your audience, the more you build your brand loyalty and reach. But many funeral homes aren’t sure what kind of content they should post to engage their audience on Facebook.

We have helped funeral homes reach over 5 million people on Facebook this year alone, so we know a bit about what works and what doesn’t!

I’d like to highlight some tips and ideas for engaging your audience on Facebook in a way that helps you achieve your business goals through real life examples from some of your peer’s Facebook Pages.

Let’s get right into it!

1. Photos and Videos Get the Most Engagement

Humans are visual. Photos and videos catch people’s attention as they quickly scroll through their Facebook news feed and thus get the most engagement. Photos get over 50% more engagement than text-only posts, and videos do even better! According to Facebook, “Bright, colorful images depicting human interaction are particularly successful.”

So it’s time to start flexing your artistic muscles and create some eye-popping graphics! Here’s a great example we shared for one of our partner firms.

 

2. Keep Your Message Positive

People go on Facebook to see interesting stuff, find out what their friends are doing, smile, laugh or learn a little something. They don’t go on Facebook to focus on death or mortality. But as a funeral home, how do you balance your message to keep it on topic but not too focused on death? Just be sure to keep your message light and up-lifting. Here’s a great example that got tons of engagement: almost 700 likes!

 

3. Educate Your Audience

Most people don’t know much about our industry, but on Facebook, people enjoy learning new and interesting things! That’s great for funeral homes, since education is one of the best forms of marketing. Help your community understand what it is you do, and why it matters. Perhaps you post about a day in the life of a funeral director. It might sound boring to you, since it’s your job, but I guarantee it will pique the interest of people in your community!

Some other ideas:

• Post pictures of different rooms or parts of your facility and/or grounds and describe what they are used for
• Highlight each of your employees and what their role in your firm entails
• Describe the different types of dispositions along with pros and cons of each
• Help people understand the benefits of planning ahead
• Provide some history of your firm and grounds
• Describe the traditions and history of different funeral services
• Offer grief tips and helpful articles on dealing with grief
• Offer some funeral etiquette, such as what to wear to a service or how to write a condolence letter

What other ideas can you think of?

 

4. Toot Your Own Horn

It’s ok to brag every now and then, especially if you’re sharing some flattering words about your firm from someone you’ve served. That’s the power of posting testimonials: you provide folks with social validation, meaning they see just how valued their peers in their community find your service.

One way we do this for our clients is we collect reviews from their customers. For the positive ones, we ask the reviewer for permission to share it, and then we put the review on a graphical background to create what we call a Review Board, then post them to Facebook. The graphic helps the post get people’s attention, and this ensures that a lot of people in the community see just how valued the firm is!

Here’s one example:

5. Show How You’re Different

Let your fans see what makes you different from other firms and other businesses in your area. What is it that makes you so great? Show them! Perhaps you provide the ultimate personalization and craft unique celebrations of life. That’s the case for Robert’s Family Funeral Home in Forest Lake, MN. They helped honor someone within the hockey community with a unique and memorable celebration you see below. This really resonated within the Forest Lake community, and the post got tons of engagement and positive feedback.

 

6. Humor is OK. Actually, it’s Good!

People go on Facebook to smile and laugh. Often, they don’t associate those traits with a funeral home, but it’s ok for a funeral home to be funny sometimes. In fact, it helps your brand by showing that not only do you know how to be serious, sympathetic and supportive, but that you also know how to make people smile. Here’s a great example!

 

7. If It Works Once, Post it Again!

This is a powerful little secret that most people don’t know about. If you have a post that gets good engagement once, you really ought to post it again! The reason is that even the most successful posts on Facebook are only seen by a small fraction of your fans, those who happen to have logged in within the first few hours after you posted it. The rest of your audience never even sees it. Don’t let a good post go to waste by only posting it once! What we do for our clients is we monitor their posts, and if one gets great engagement, we wait a few months and post it again. Almost always, it does just as well or even better the next time around. This ensures the best posts get seen by as many people as possible. This is the Boomerang feature, which is automatically included in our Social Media Copilot software.

 

 

There you go: 7 tips and examples that will help you go viral and get positive engagement on your Facebook Page.

Of course, if you’re still struggling to get the results you want from your Facebook Page, or simply don’t have time to manage it properly yourself, we’ll be happy to help! Check out our Social Media Copilot solution, which has helped funeral homes reach over 5 million people in their communities this year alone. It’s the most advanced, proven and effective solution in our industry! We make your Facebook strategy simple and effective. So contact us now and let’s Go Viral Together.