If you are looking to connect with your community on social media, build relationships and interact with them on a regular basis; engagement is the name of the game.

In Lebanon, Facebook is especially popular, with about 1.7 million Facebook users, or 40% of the overall population. And according to Facebook data from Q4 2012, featured in this infographic by social4ce, Lebanese users like to engage. They "Like" approximately 49 pages and make around 93 Likes and 25 comments per month.

There's plenty of organic engagement, but your ability to captivate Lebanese users depends upon your brand's ability to provide a relevant experience through interesting and rich content, one-to-one conversations, and responses to user’s contributions on social networks.

Here are a few tips for boosting your engagement: 

1. Know your audience. Learn your stats: 55% of Lebanon's Facebook users are men (45% are women), with an average age of 29, and most use English (84.5% vs. 11.3% for Arabic). 
    
2. Focus on what your audience wants. Study the interests of your target audience in order to provide them with compelling content. Educate your community by creating content with a great informational value. Monitor conversations and use social data to reveal interesting insights.
    
3. Create an attractive identity for you social media properties: A study by Mass Relevance revealed that 59% of consumers are more likely to trust brands that have established a solid social media presence. Make your page visually attractive to the visitors by using quality images, clear information and by linking to your website (and posting social media links on your website). The same study revealed that 60% of users are more likely to share a brand’s message if the brand has integrated with social media channels.
    
4. Work on continuously increasing your fan base: The larger and the more qualified your online community is, the more users will be aware of your content and message. Hold competitions from time to time, update your content regularly, and take advantage of what is actually happening in the news by making it relevant to your community.
    
5. Use rich content: Express your message with photos and videos, to make your content quick and easily shareable so that your audience engages with it spontaneously.
    
6. Humanize your brand: In order to engage with consumers, you need to gain a personality that will make you unique. Inject some emotions, be topical (post messages around the important events such as the holidays, for example), and don’t ACT social: BE social, offline and on.