Having strong social media engagement can be a sign that your business is making an impact in the market. Increasing social media engagement is not about gaining popularity, it’s about forging meaningful and long-term connections with existing and new customers, which will help increase brand awareness and boost ROI both on and offline.
Social media engagement is when a user interacts with your social media platforms. It measures:
- Reactions
- Follows
- Shares
- Comments
- Retweets
- Click-throughs
Increasing engagement across social media channels is the primary strategy for 80% of digital marketers. Frequently engaging with your audience online can help your brand in many ways. It allows you to understand your audience, build relationships with them, respond to them and ultimately give them an exceptional service. Here are some tools and tips to help your business improve its social media engagement.
1 Analyse your engagement
To improve your engagement, you need to analyse your content first. If a post has a significant engagement rate, it is important to note what made it stand out. This will help you identify what content to focus on and work towards improving your engagement. Use some tools to help you measure your social media success
2. Post shareable content
The most shareable content is high-quality content. Content comes in different forms and topics. The best content is informative and interesting. It should get the audience to click, engage and convert. When developing your content, you need to ask yourself if the content is emotive and worth sharing.
One of the best ways to get someone’s attention is to share a fact or statistic that relates to your industry, about something they may not have known before reading your post. Even though we mostly use social media for entertainment, many of us don’t mind learning a thing or two while exploring our news feed.
3. Create thumb-stopping headlines
Eight out of ten people will only read the headline. Whether you are trying to drive traffic to your blog post or product page, your headlines should be captivating. Optimising your headlines can also lead to engagement such as click-through. Headlines draw in the reader, even if they do not click on the article, so it’s important to choose attractive headlines for your content.
4. Use emojis more
Using emojis can boost social media engagement. According to Digiday, there are 6 million emojis used daily on social media. Emojis are now available as dog toys, scatter cushions, costumes, accessories- each one carefully selected based on emojis that appeal to the customer. So, it’s safe to say that emojis are everywhere! More than 90% of internet users across multiple devices use emojis when engaging online. A smiley face emoji can boost interaction by 25% whereas a grimacing emoji can increase engagement by 138%.
Brands that use emojis in their posts tend to see an increase in engagement. Your mind views emojis as similar to the human face, which is why the use of emojis will incite better reactions than text. Those who use emojis in their social media posts tend to see an increase in likes, comments, and shares.
Facebook posts that contain emojis can get 57% more likes and 33% more comments and shares compared to those without them. Tweets with emojis have a 25% higher engagement rate. According to a study by Quintly, 57% of Instagram profiles are using at least one emoji in their posts. It’s clear that emojis have the potential to boost your engagement, so take advantage of this opportunity – it’s free!
5. Include images with your posts
Using high quality images that makes your content pop in a news feed, will grab the attention of your audience and allow them to connect with your content before reading it. A news feed is filled with visuals and it takes attractive images to make people stop to look and engage with your content.
6. Post frequently
As the saying goes, social media best practices warrant quality over quantity. If you are posting 20 or 100 times a day, your posts might not receive any engagement, but social media users will ignore it because the brand appears frequently in their news feed – this is annoying to them. You do not want your audience to suffer from ad fatigue. Ad/ creative fatigue is something marketers tend to overlook- people get tired of seeing the same ad over and over again.
It’s also important to know when to post. If you post something while most of your followers are inactive, you could potentially miss out on engagement opportunities. According to a study by CoSchedule, Facebook posts tend to drive the most engagement between 1 PM and 4 PM on the weekends. On Twitter, your best chance to increase engagement is around 12 PM to 3 PM during the week. And on Instagram, users are engaged throughout the week with the most active hours being 8 AM -9 AM.
7. Curate content
Curating content helps you reduce the stress of having to always create your own content. When you come across a great article that will interest your audience and complement your brand, share it on your social media. All you need to do is create a post that appeals to your brand and audience. The most basic form of content curation is a retweet. By retweeting, you are sharing content that is similar to your brand voice and created by brands that you follow.
Curating content also shows that the brand does not operate in isolation. It actively listens to its audience and the industry. Which will help increase engagement and brand awareness.
8. Use hashtags
Hashtags are key to increasing engagement and making your content easy to discover. When used correctly, hashtags can help people interested in your industry and content find what you are creating and help increase your following at zero cost to your business. Brands that use hashtags can see a 50% increase in engagement compared to those who do not use hashtags. In fact, tweets with one or two hashtags have 21% more engagement than those with three or more.
9. Post more video content
Original graphics and images are an excellent way to increase engagement on social media. The key is to create and post more videos. While you regularly post images, videos bring a refreshing change to your usual content.
Content is king and with videos it’s no different. Even if you create great video content, if its not promoted correctly, it won’t be seen by the right people (at the right time) and it will affect engagement if not promoted correctly. Here are some tips that can help your videos acquire a higher reach:
- Enable video autoplay – Since Facebook launched its autoplay feature for videos in September 2013, Facebook has actually surpassed YouTube in desktop views. Video content performs well because social media users explore their news feed in a hurry and autoplay videos allows them to view video content as they scroll through their feed.
- Use hashtags – Using hashtags can help people discover your content and increase your following. It’s important to understand when and where to use them, as well as how to avoid overusing them.
- Video and length structure – Each social channel platform has different requirements for its video length and structure. It’s important to tweak your strategy to accommodate each medium. For example, short-form video content performs better and should include banding within the first 5 seconds to ensure that the viewer keeps the brand ‘top of mind’ while watching.
Lastly, remember to use the best keywords, titles, descriptions, and tags. Doing this can help you not only rank well and get your videos discovered on search engines like YouTube.
10. Respond to all comments
To help boost engagement, you need to engage your audience. When your audience sends you a message or leaves a comment, they are giving you a chance to talk to them. Whether it is a positive or negative comment, you should always answer it. This can help build a relationship with the audience and show them that the brand is open and appreciates feedback. Show kindness and appreciation when the comment is both positive and negative, and suggest a solution when the comment is negative. Be personable and approachable when responding to comments and always use comments as a chance to connect with people.
To conclude…
Boosting your social media engagement takes time and effort and it’s important to have a qualified Community Manager who will be responsible for setting and implementing social media and communication campaigns to align with marketing strategies. Providing engaging text, image and video content for social media accounts. Responding to comments and customer queries in a timely manner. Brands that focus on growing their social media engagement can benefit from better marketing reach, ROI and higher brand awareness.
