Call-to-Action Buttons on Facebook

Facebook is about staying connected with family and friends. Facebook Pages are about engagement with followers. Engagement comes in many forms: clicks, Likes, Shares, and Comments.

Reach (that is the number of followers who actually see your Facebook Page posts) increases with engagement. So the more followers who engage with a post, the more followers who will see it.

Facebook has added a new way to engage Page followers. It is Call-to-Action(CTA) buttons. Facebook has been rolling these out for a while, but not everyone may have access to it yet.

If you are an Administrator of a Facebook Page, check the lower right hand corner of your Cover Photo. If it looks like this, you have the button option. If all you see is Liked and Message, you do not have it yet.

When you click on the Create Call-to-Action button, you will see this:

Here I selected “Watch Video” from the drop down list.  After I selected that I had to add the video url and then click Next (2x) to confirm whether I wanted devices using IOS and Android platforms to use the same url or something different. Then I clicked “Save.” The Call-to-Action Button then appeared on the Facebook Page like this:

Administrators can see the number of clicks on your CTA button over the last 7 days on the This Week panel that appears on the right of your Page. In this case Watch Video was clicked 1 time.

Facebook also provides Call-to-Action buttons on videos that are uploaded directly to Facebook and on certain Facebook Ads. By directing followers to an action, you increase the probability of them engaging with your post which is what you want. If people are not engaging with the posts your Facebook Page, they won’t be seeing your posts very often or at all. That is the way the new Facebook algorithm works now.

Think about how your can use Call-to-Action buttons to increase engagement with your followers and then do it.

Have you already started using these Facebook CTA buttons? What is your experience?

Added FYI:  Beginning March 12, 2015, Facebook will start to remove Likes from Pages that come from accounts that have been manually deactivated. If you see a decline in your Page Likes after that date–this could be the reason. Don’t be alarmed.  This will give you a truer count of the number of Likes. The loss of Likes from most pages is not expected to be significant.