If you are struggling with low social media engagement, it could be your strategies, not just processes. To boost engagement, concentrate on increasing a solid following, being real, and applying proactive engagement strategies.
While an absence of organic engagement can be due to how often your content is being shown to followers, it’s probably due to a problem with your social media strategy. Discover how to boost your social media engagement across different platforms and why it’s critical.
Engagement on Social Media
Social media engagement is how individuals engage with your content and company on various social media platforms, including:
- Comments
- Mentions
- Click-throughs
- Shares
- Followers
Social media engagement calculates how active and attracted your audience is with the content you’ve created. High engagement signifies that you have a solid connection with your audience, leading to heightened brand awareness, more website traffic, and increased sales. Furthermore, this amount of engagement can help you gather critical feedback, cultivate a sense of community, and boost customer loyalty, further reinforcing your business’s connection with its audience.
What You Need to Know Beforehand
Before getting into engagement strategies, it’s critical for brands to be clear on what sort of social media engagement they want to drive, and what goal this strategy should tackle. For example, some businesses may want to remain top-of-mind for their target group. This is when on-platform engagements such as comments, followers, and likes are ideal.
Knowing these challenges early on helps in making realistic goals and making way for the success of social media engagement strategies across numerous platforms.
Managing Negative Feedback
Negative comments and reviews could damage a brand’s reputation, making it difficult to handle them efficiently. Over 90% of consumers say a bad review deters them from purchasing from a business. Handling these issues without harming your brand’s image is a continuing business challenge.
Measuring Social Media ROI
Brands necessitate clarity to maximize their strategies and rationalize social media spending. Determining the ROI from social media efforts can be like solving a hard puzzle. No surprise, that over 50% of marketing professionals struggle to track ROI from social media marketing accurately. Realizing what’s working is difficult without tracking the correct metrics.
Struggling to Push Website Traffic
Many businesses strive to convert social media engagement into website visits. While shares and likes are always good, their real test is changing passive engagement into traffic that drives conversions. Even though some social media platforms get close to one billion users a day, just depending on engagement won’t make a brand successful. To really capitalize on this audience, businesses need to move past just shares and likes.
Sustaining Audience Engagement
The interest of an audience changes quickly. What was interesting today might not be tomorrow. Therefore, keeping up with the current social media trends and making sure your content stays fresh is vital. Most marketing budgets are spent on digital marketing. This major investment reflects the crucial role of social media in contemporary business strategies.
Tips to Boost Social Media Engagement
Boosting social media engagement is a little more than frequent posting. Here are some key strategies to effectively move your engagement across your social media platforms.
Be Authentic
Many customers decide which businesses they support and like based on their attraction to the business’s personality and voice. One of the top ways to effectively boost social media engagement is to be more authentic.
Discover a social media marketing voice that personifies your brand, sticking to it while intermingling with your internet audience. Many people prefer funny content, so you may want to use humor through GIFs or trending memes as a way to boost your likes, shares, or comments.
Additionally, customers respond well to businesses that are honest. Regardless of whether it’s admitting errors or sharing your company’s values, integrity may go a long way in building trust with your followers and helping them to continually support your brand.
Leverage Authentic Storytelling
Businesses with captivating brand stories often boost customer loyalty by almost 20%. One of the best ways to test this theory is by using social media.
Social media platforms let businesses interact with their audiences on an individual level, narrating a story could be a huge part of this. Audience members can get to know your business, your brand, and its objective.
Authenticity is vital to connecting with your target audience via a compelling story. Talk about what goes on behind the scenes and personal experiences that will personalize your brand and promote a connection with your audience.
Post Seasonal Content
Practically each month, there’s a holiday including New Year’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Memorial Day, 4th of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and more.
Create a post for every holiday. For instance, on Valentine’s Day, create a social media post that communicates your love for your audience and attach an image that expresses this message such as cupid or hearts.
You could also have a holiday contest. Doing so allows you to get more visitors, followers, and likes, helping you create awareness about your business while encouraging quick action.
Respond to Followers
Responding to your audience is one of the simplest ways to boost social media engagement, but businesses frequently overlook it. Many brands will post content and leave it at that. This is a mistake. You need to comment back to your audience, engaging them in some sort of dialogue.
It takes two to have a conversation, so you need to talk frequently to your audience members. If people comment on your content, answer them. Use this conversation to talk about your business.
Adhere to a Posting Schedule
When and how frequently you post on social media affects your engagement levels. To optimize engagement, determine the best time of day to post for your audience and stick to the schedule. Your posting schedule should be decided by what platform you’re on and when your audience is most active online.
Giveaways and Contests
These posts promote sharing and audience participation, substantially boosting engagement and visibility in an electrifying and fun way. Offering attractive prizes helps get your audience’s attention and encourages them to engage with your brand, making the process rewarding.
Incentivizing your social media interactions increases your reach and produces enthusiasm around your brand. When users share the contest with their networks, it generates buzz, pushes traffic, and supports a sense of community among your audience.
Encourage User-Generated Content
User-generated content is an excellent way to boost social media engagement since it encourages audience members to post about your brand, leading to incredible word-of-mouth recommendations to try your services or products.
Interactive Posts
Question-and-answer sessions, polls, and quizzes actively include your audience. These posts increase engagement rates and help collect important insights right from the audience regarding their opinions and preferences. Actively including your audience creates opportunities for real-time feedback and fosters stronger connections.
Use Strategic Hashtags
It can be difficult to create an audience from random viewers on social media. However, tools such as hashtags can boost your visibility on your social media platforms by including words that fit your industry and audience. Using strategic hashtags makes it simpler for people to find you and help you be aware of trends in your market.
Ask Questions
When you post questions as content, you can get your viewers to engage more with your brand. It creates a simple way for you to get your audience to engage with you on social media.
When you ask questions, be sure to stick to brand-related and industry questions. You want to ask questions related to your business so you can get visitors thinking about your products and brand. Asking questions is one of the top social media engagement strategies for getting viewers to participate.
You inspire them to become part of the conversation and engage with your brand. Make sure not to ask either-or questions. Instead, ask open-ended questions. Instead of asking, “Do you like flip-flops or sandals?” try asking, “What’s your favorite summer footwear?” Open-ended questions could create more room for dialogue, encouraging more audience members to engage.
Incorporate Visual Assets
When your audience is skimming through social media, you only have a couple of seconds to get their attention before they swipe to the next post in their feed. Visual assets such as videos, infographics, and photos are more likely to stand out in the feed and get your viewers’ attention, boosting overall engagement.
Particularly, video has become vital to numerous content strategies with a vast number of marketers asserting their branded videos have provided them with an increased ROI. Whatever you decide, search for ways you can include more visual posts on your social media platforms.
We Can Help
Do you need help boosting engagement on your social media platforms? As a top paid social agency, we created customized paid media strategies that adhere to current best practices.
Contact us today to get started.
