Social media is a powerful weapon when it comes to helping businesses connect with fans, clients, customers. Given that social media is very connected today, it offers you a way to reach your audience no matter where they spend their time. Which is hugely important for a companies growth online.
While many businesses use social media, many struggle to engage people with their content. But the good news is that there are always ways to improve social media engagement.
Below are some tried and tested social media marketing tips to try to boost engagement in the digital space.
Social media engagement is a direct conversation between an individual and a brand, which takes place within social media networks. This can come in a diverse range of ways, including:
- Likes;
- Comments;
- Social Shares;
- Saved Items;
- Click Thoughts; and
- Retweets
Measuring the engagement received through social media is highly important. Without doing so, you will never truly know what is working, how to plan or understand the best possible ways to engage with your audience.
Consistency is key
Did you know lack of consistency is one of the biggest ways to kill your businesses reach?
Inactive social media accounts look bad and reflect back on a business in a negative way.
Posting to social media inconsistently or at random times can be limiting, and many times will be hindering, to your business because businesses you are telling the social networks that you are not active on the platforms.
As a result, platforms will not give these posts a preference in the newsfeed.
To be seen by more people and to appear near the top of the feed, posting consistently is the key. This way, your business feed stays fresh and relevant and more opportunities to attract the right eyeballs!
To increase social media engagement, your brand needs to social and interact as your business.
When a customer sends a message or leaves a comment, they are giving your business the opportunity to talk and interact with them. As well as replying, there is also great value in liking other posts, leaving thoughtful comments, and sharing valuable content.
This will then bring awareness back to your profile and you will have the opportunity to connect.
Let that personality shine
Just because you are a business page or profile, does not mean you cannot showcase any form of personality. On social media platforms is exactly where business owners and brands should let their personality shine and capture the audience’s attention.
So, what does this look like in practice? Well, the idea is to act with a slight sprinkle of humor, indulgence, attitude, and irony whenever possible on content.
Although, it is essential to keep things professional, it is also effective to personalize content if you want your audience to engage and interact.
Switch content up
Not every post will see the same rate of response across every audience.
For example, videos might get more impressions, but may not necessarily get a high engagement response. Similarly, a lighthearted GIF may result in more saves and likes, but not necessarily any call to actions.
A powerful strategy is to try a variety of different content types. Quotes, videos, images, infographics, news, surveys.
After a little experimenting, you will be able to tell what is working and what needs to be adjusted accordingly.
Tools, tools and more tools
Social media marketing can be complex, but there is no reason a business needs to do it single handedly. There is a diverse selection of various tools that are extremely useful for building user engagement.
Some favorites include the following:
- Canva: Making it simple and easy to design visual content;
- Unsplash: Beautifully free imagery to use and share;
- Keyhole: Hashtag analytics for Twitter, Instagram and Facebook;
- HubSpot: Marketing, sales and service software that helps business grow; and
- Buffer: Publishing, analytics and engagement platform.
Let’s be honest, coming up with new content often to keep your audience engaged is not an easy task, right? To keep this going on a consistent basis requires creativity, time, and money. Maybe it’s time to look into curated content?
Curated content is content from other sources that you share on your social media platforms. It’s simply sharing relevant content from others similar to you that aligns with your brand and target audience.
Sharing others’ content is one of the best ways to show that you are not all about your business, and that you value a variety of perspectives beyond your own.
Just do not forget to give credit to the original source!
Move on from what is not working
The best critic for growth on social media is the business itself.
By regularly looking at the analytics in the backend of your business pages, you can start to see what posts are performing well and which are ones are performing quite average.
The higher performing posts will give you a great idea of what is resonating and interests your audience. This is what needs to be focused on. By putting up more of these, it will not be long before you notice your accounts starting to grow.
Social media is the biggest platform for communication worldwide and it requires businesses to be actively listening and responding to each channel. Practicing engagement will shine a light on businesses and allows them to stand out from the crowd.
Experimenting with content to find what works for each individual brand, use analytics to see what posts are loved and spend time engaging with clients and customers is a valuable place to start.
Working to boost engagement will be an ongoing task. So, keep patient and get your engaging game on.