How To Increase Social Media Engagement For Your Business

For modern brands with an online presence, powerful social media engagement is a sign that you’re having an influence in the market. It’s not merely about looking popular: it’s about making meaningful connections with current and future customers, which will serve to increase your brand (and ROI) both on and offline.

Social media engagement is a very important metric to think about when building your business. While most organisations want to increase the size of their audience, they frequently fail to increase their social media engagement. When you are engaging with your followers on social media you are able to turn them from fans into customers. The time which you dedicate to building relationships with your audience can lead to a higher number of sales, boosted in customer loyalty as well as higher positive reviews.

What are the best practices to increase engagement on social media?

Ever wondered why you post apparently good content on social media however get little engagement? Well, you are definitely not alone.

Many brands see quite little engagement on their social media posts notwithstanding all their hard work and they don’t really know why.  However you can always improve your social media engagement marketing strategy. Here’s how to increase social media engagement.

Use Wit and Humour

People utilise social media to be entertained and not to be sold to. So if all of your social media posts are overly promotional and inviting people to purchase your products, you could end up losing your audience’s attention. Rather, utilise humour regularly in your social media posts to entertain your followers as well as improve social media engagement.

Create Original and Engaging Visuals

The stock standard Facebook post gets 120% less engagement than posts which include an image. So if you would like to boost social media engagement, you need to post more images. It could be photos, memes, GIFs, or – alternatively – even original graphics. You can utilise tools such as PixTeller, Piktochart, and Canva to put together unique visuals that will engage your social media audience.

On the other hand, use Crello which has a number of templates and personalised designs you can choose from. Also, you can choose to create your images from scratch. Their design editor also allows you to customise your visuals utilising shapes, photos, text, colours, and more.

Create More Video Content

Unique graphics and images are an excellent way to boost social media engagement on Twitter and Facebook. However on a visual social media platform such as Instagram, you’re already posting eye-catching images to engage your followers.

How can a business improve social media engagement?

It’s challenging to measure your growth if you don’t know where you’re starting off from. So you need to put on your data scientist hat and write down your up-to-date number of followers, how many comments and shares that you’re getting on average per posting, or whatever numbers are significant to you.  After this, make sure to keep tracking often so that you catch rises or dips in engagement that can provide you with valuable clues about what’s working (or, just as importantly, what’s not).

Of course, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution of social media marketing engagement. Since every company’s business goals are quite different, every company’s social media strategy will be too. Depending on what suits your brand – as well as what your business has to offer – your social media engagement goals might include the following:

• Altering public perception of your brand,
• Growing new customer leads,
• Collecting feedback about new products,
• Educating your audience with resources and advice, and
• Know your audience.

It’s challenging to get people engaged if you don’t really know who you’re talking to. The kind of language, tone, and resources which resonate are probably going to be different for a skateboarding company as opposed to a gardening supply shop.

How do you spark engagement on social media?

Stock photography looks fantastic but your audience will engage WAY MORE when you post photos of you, your business, your team, or – alternatively – any behind-the-scenes images. Audiences are starting to grow immune to stock imagery. While it may be attractive, it does nothing to connect with your brand or earn the trust which you need in order to convert your viewers into followers or customers.

Ask your audience to engage with things through posing a number of different questions. Examples include:

• “Would you rather?” images,
• “Which do you like better?” with photos,
• “Share a selfie or image of…” or
• Requesting your audience to respond to a question with a GIf is popular also.

At times, a simple “What are your thoughts about…” can get people talking.  People really love to share their lives if asked to do so. This kind of engagement is great for ensuring that people see your posts and algorithms share your content.

When apt, and without being spammy, invite people to the conversation by tagging or mentioning them in the content. This will spread your reach to new audiences however should not be overused. Business owners who randomly tag groups of people without considering if they’d be interested are propagating the spam culture that makes it so challenging for brands to reach people. Utilise tagging as a way to share something pertinent, celebrate a milestone, promote collaboration, or post a review or testimonial. If you have power partners or sponsors, talk about those projects and relationships and tag those businesses in the content.

How do you measure social media engagement for business?

Make sure that you’re utilising UTM parameters on social links, and that you stick with a consistent system for these parameters. The source should be the channel name (in other words. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.), and Medium should be a higher level category such as social in order to bucket all social traffic. Else, you run the risk of social traffic becoming lost in the Google Analytics black box in which social dark traffic isn’t ascribed to the proper source and instead is lumped into Direct.

In addition, UTM tags can help differentiate between multiple posts which link to the same content so that you are able to track engagement response to a number of different methods of driving traffic to your site.

When you are designing a post for social media which is geared towards increasing sales, you can utilise Google Analytics to attribute revenue to this particular post. You are able to do this by including links back to your website, which can be tracked and analysed by Google Analytics.

Combine these with UTM tracking and goals in order to see the benefit that social media is having on your company’s revenue. This assists you with identifying trends and patterns as to what your customers are engaging with as well as what they aren’t paying that much attention to. As a result, you are able to refine your social media strategy to coordinate with these trends.

Get in touch with the Digital School of Marketing

If you would like to learn more about social media marketing, then you need to do our Social Media Marketing Course. Follow this link to find out more.