Social media is increasingly becoming the key marketing tool for many businesses as it can create waves of positivity for the brand, boosting awareness and conversions.
Social media promotion is essential for businesses, but merely posting your content on these channels won’t result in increased sales. The key to being successful with social media is engagement. Follow the tips below to increase social media engagement and grow your business.
What Is Social Media Engagement?
Most marketers believe that social media engagement is the key to successful marketing, but it can be difficult to achieve. Social media engagement can mean different things to different people, but generally it refers to getting a response from target audiences.
There are many ways that people can express their approval or support for something online. This can include liking or sharing a post, commenting on it, tagging someone in it, or retweeting it. It can also include following someone, favoriting something, or repining something. Clicks, upvotes, and views can also show support.
Engagement is a two-way dialogue between brands and customers that is important because it affects Facebook’s Edgerank algorithm, which determines how much of an audience views content.
If you’re sharing content on social media networks, do people appreciate it and engage with it? And how can you get more of this sort of engagement? These are questions that many marketers are asking today.
The best way to get people engaged with you on social media is to be engaged with them. Most people don’t care how much you know until they know that you care. Start by being involved with them and giving without expecting anything in return.
There are many things you can do to increase social media engagement. In this article, I cover many ways to increase social media engagement.
Tips For Increasing Your Social Media Engagement
Talk About Your Topic (Not Just Your Brand)
If you’re new to a situation or group of people, it’s important to start talking to them so they know who you are. Posting content on social media is one way to do this, but if you don’t have many followers, you can also join or create groups to get your name out there.
It is not effective to join just any group. For example, if you are a beauty salon, it would be a waste of time to join a group about electrical work since it would not reach the right people. Joining groups that are related to your business will increase the chance of reaching your target audience and becoming known by potential customers.
Joining Facebook groups focused on health and nutrition is key for businesses in those markets to get people talking about their brand.
Joining forums related to your area of expertise is a great way to connect with potential customers and promote your brand. You can create groups on social media platforms and invite key influencers and prospective customers to join in the discussion. This is an effective way to spread your brand awareness.
Join Question & Answer Sessions
A great way to increase content on your blog, Facebook page, or other social media page is to ask your audience questions. Ask them what they like, what their plans are for this weekend, when the last time they took a vacation was, and where they went. Ask them to fill in the blank for a question.
When you ask people about themselves, they are usually more than willing to respond. If you ask the right questions, you will get more comments and likes. If you respond to their comments, you will be able to establish a two-way dialogue with your fans and followers.
Q&A sessions are a great way to give customers useful information and get seen as a helpful brand. You can offer relevant answers to customer queries and spark discussion with your prospective customers before your competitors do.
As consumers become more impatient and want answers to their queries immediately, a dedicated customer response team provides the perfect solution.
It’s a “best practice” to look up the most common FAQs in your field and create detailed guides or blog posts to give customers more information on their queries. You can show that you’re willing to help them out by adding links to these resources in your responses. People are more likely to buy from a brand that they trust and know will be there for them if something goes wrong. By making your responses a hub of helpful information, you can attract more buyers and become a more successful business.
This, in turn, will lead to more visitors to your website. Answering questions on forums like Quora and LinkedIn Groups in the domain of your expertise can help to establish you as an expert, which may result in more visitors to your website.
Answering questions on LinkedIn will help you connect with people and establish yourself as a credible source of information. This is a great way to build your reputation and brand yourself on social media.
Share Other People’s Content
If someone else has better answers to a customer’s question, use their content. Your customers will see that you are there to give them what they need, and that you are not afraid to share information from other sources. If your social media feed can provide relevant information from a variety of sources, your brand will be more attractive to customers and they will be more likely to follow you.
It is important to keep your content diverse and from different contributors to maintain customer interest. Having the same person talk about the same thing all the time can become boring. So share your content with others!
Reposting Customer or Follower Posts
You should share content from different businesses in your industry, as well as content created by your followers and customers. This is especially important for established brands. For example, if a customer tweets about how much they love your chocolate, and you share that tweet, it will be an exciting moment for that customer.
In addition to making the customer feel valued, sharing their content can lead to them sharing your reply to them or even screenshotting the evidence of you favoriting or sharing their content. This can help build goodwill and create a loyal customer base.
If you share positive posts related to your brand or goods and services, you can increase customer engagement.
The Coca-Cola Company shares social media posts that positively promote the use of Coca-Cola products and include the specific hashtag #ShareACoke.
The video posted by Walkers Crisps on their channel uses football star Reggie Yates to promote their product and encourage football fans to buy it. This is a clever way to target a large audience through the use of follower/influencer content.
Using Influencers to Share Content
If you’ve already built relationships with bloggers and social media influencers, you can use those relationships to get your content shared.
A win-win situation can be created by asking well-known individuals in your area of expertise to promote your posts in return for a discount or freebie. This way, your prospective customers will see your brand promoted by a trusted, familiar face. Offering something in return for the shares helps to ensure the influencer feels like they are getting value from collaborating with you.
Guest Posting
Tools like Twitter Cards can also be used to share blog content on Twitter, increasing the reach and engagement of your tweets. Creating content that can be promoted across social media channels by influencers is a great way to increase social media engagement. Guest posting on blogs and news channels is a great way to create in-depth articles that can be promoted across social media, increasing the reach and engagement of your tweets. Twitter Cards is a great tool that can be used to share blog content on Twitter, increasing the reach and engagement of your tweets.
This is a great opportunity to give customers more details about your company and what you can offer them. You can use this to improve your SEO and website rankings by writing a detailed, useful blog post.
Listen in to the Conversation
If you want to engage your audience on social media, you need to start by listening to what they’re saying. There are plenty of free tools available to help you monitor your brand’s audience, so there’s no excuse not to use them.
There are a number of tools available that allow you to track mentions of your brand or product online, as well as where your website links are being shared. This can be useful in gauging public opinion of your company and products.
Create Exceptional Blog Content
Blog posts with a good amount of shares and comments are becoming increasingly rare as more and more content is being created and shared online every day. According to AOL/Nielsen, 27 million pieces of content are shared each day. In order to make your content stand out from all the other content that is out there, you need to find ways to make it more unique and attention-grabbing.
There are a few bloggers that do this well, Neil Patel and Brian Dean being a couple of examples. If you’re looking for a great example of this, Brian Dean’s Google 200 Ranking Factors is a great article to check out.
Create Stunning Images
Images are the most engaging form of content on the internet today. Research says that using images can result in an 85% interaction rate on Facebook and increased retweets by 35% on Twitter.
The pictures you use on social media need to be special in order to capture people’s attention and make them want to engage with your content. Clickz.com has some great suggestions for the types of visuals that can help increase social media engagement.
Create Engaging Videos
It is predicted that native Facebook videos will surpass YouTube videos in engagement, so it is now important for brands to post videos on both Facebook and YouTube.
If you have not created video content before, you have less and less excuses to do so. With tools like Meerkat and Periscope, it has never been easier to stream videos from your phone.
Although it is early days for both Meerkat and Periscope, brands such as Red Bull, Starbucks, the Miami Dolphins, Mastercard, and BuzzFeed are already testing them out. Being an early adopter of these apps can help you get ahead of the competition when it comes to social media engagement.
Create Interactive Content
Have you ever found yourself taking one of those silly online tests to see which Game of Thrones character you are? (I got Arya, by the way). Or maybe you took a test to find out the color of your aura? Have you ever gotten angry at a Facebook friend for sending you a Farmville or Candy Crush request? If you have, you’ve fallen victim to what’s called the “sunk cost fallacy.” The sunk cost fallacy is when someone takes into account their past investments, like time or money, when making a decision about whether or not to continue investing in something.
Some of the most engaging content online, as shown in the few examples above, is interactive, involving games, tools, quizzes, contests, or apps. While it may take a bit of investment, it’s not difficult to come up with a Facebook or other app that offers your audience an interactive experience.
Start a Podcast
According to the Kissmetrics blog:
Podcasting apps on smartphones have made it extremely easy to listen, subscribe, and download podcasts. This provides an opportunity to tap into a market that is not as crowded in order to reach potential customers.
The reasons that podcasts boost engagement is that:
Unlike reading text, hearing someone’s voice creates a stronger connection. By creating podcasts, you give people a reason to keep coming back to your online store.
Having a podcast can help you be noticed more easily on social media, and you can build a group of loyal listeners who will enjoy your content.