Social media marketing is one of the fastest-growing marketing channels that is used in some form by almost all businesses today. Some businesses use social media ads while others use social media as a customer support channel. No matter how you use social media for marketing and promoting your business, you can’t do it without an engaged audience.
Social media engagement is the major driving force behind all social media activity. Having millions of followers is meaningless if they don’t like, comment, and share your content.
You need to work on boosting engagement. How to increase social media engagement? Let’s find out.
What is Social Media Engagement?
Social media engagement is the measure of likes, shares, reposts, comments, and other types of interaction of your followers with your social media content. Engagement metrics aren’t constant and vary greatly.
For example, you’ll measure engagement on Facebook on the basis of likes, comments, and shares while you’ll measure it via views, comments, and thumbs up on YouTube.
Interaction with your content is termed as engagement and the interaction is determined by the social media network you are using. Generally, 72% of marketers consider likes and comments as social media engagement while 62% define it in terms of reshares:
So, interaction in any form is referred to as engagement.
How to Increase Social Media Engagement
Increasing engagement is the dream of every social media marketer. However, only a few succeed in doing so. This is because there isn’t any formula or a set pattern or a system to increase engagement. It is a qualitative variable that is hard to quantify making it even harder to boost it.
There are, however, certain best practices that you can use to increase social media engagement:
1. Understand Your Audience
How well do you know and understand your followers and their needs?
The idea is to understand your audience and develop a social media strategy that aligns with your followers’ interests.
Refer to your buyer personas to see what type of content your audience likes, what social media platforms it uses, what are the biggest life challenges that it faces, etc. This will give an idea of how you can engage your audience on social media.
Perhaps the best tool you have to understand your followers is the social media analytics dashboard. All the social media platforms have dedicated analytics tools that provide you with detailed reporting. Here is an example of Facebook Insights:
This is where you can check the performance of your existing posts and their engagement. It will give you a good idea of what types of posts, topics, and content work best for your followers in terms of engagement:
Use analytics and reporting to identify patterns and understand your audience better. Once you know your followers, it will get easier to increase social media engagement.
2. Publish Images
Not all types of content perform equally well. Research shows that images have the highest engagement across all social media channels:
You need to post the right content type to increase social media engagement. And the right content includes images and videos. This is because social media is all about visuals except Twitter that is more of a text-based social media platform.
For example, you can’t expect high engagement on Instagram if you aren’t posting images and photos. It is a photo-sharing app and you must share relevant photos and images to boost engagement.
Social media polls are a perfect way to increase engagement. A poll is all about engagement because people have to interact and engage with your poll for participation. Here is an example from Airbnb:
A total of 629 people participated in the survey. This is pure engagement.
Images, however, still stand out from the crowd. Start using images in every single social media post to increase engagement.
3. Encourage and Ask Followers
Go to YouTube, watch any video, and you’ll be asked to subscribe to the channel.
Right?
This is a sure way to increase social media engagement. Ask your followers and viewers to share, like, and comment.
Here is an example:
But before you ask them for engagement, you need to deliver awesome content that’s worth sharing and liking. You can’t do it with mediocre content.
You don’t have to necessarily ask for engagement in every single post. This isn’t recommended. You must mix it up. Be smart and creative.
Here is an example of how to encourage followers to engage with your post:
So, you don’t have to explicitly ask for comments and shares. Be smart and use different techniques and wordings to increase social media engagement.
4. Adjust Publishing Time
There is the best time to post on each social media platform. Make sure you schedule your posts at the right time so that it is viewed by maximum people.
Publishing content on odd days and hours is a bad idea because a lot of your followers will be offline at that time and won’t see your post in their feed.
There are a few things that you must do in order to adjust publishing:
- Schedule your social media posts at the right time and day (read this post to find the best time to publish on social media).
- Make sure you publish content when your followers are online. The analytics tool will show you when most of your followers are online.
- Increasing publishing frequency is a great way to increase social media engagement. This means whenever your followers check their feed, they’ll find your content – and will be more likely to engage.
Conclusion
Increasing social media engagement needs trial and error. You can’t double it overnight. You’ll have to constantly monitor analytics and use data to find what works for your audience.
Once you notice an increase in engagement, you need to maintain it and continue doing what you are doing. Don’t stop. Engagement fluctuates with every post and it is hard to predict. So, you must keep track of what you are doing in order to replicate your strategy.
Featured Image: Pexels
