Social media is one of the best digital marketing channels. It gives you access to thousands of potential clients, and you can even manage it for free. This availability has its negative sides as well. Most importantly, there’s a lot of people (competition) looking to market on social media.
One of the crucial metrics on social media is engagement. If you have lots of engagement, then it means that you have an effect on your target market. It doesn’t matter if you are pursuing Instagram growth or doing content marketing; engagement means that you are making real connections that will give you value.
You can simply share all the content in the world on a social network, but this won‘t get you results. The goal is to drive engagement with each post you make and convert them into sales.
Understanding Social Media Engagement
Before we start talking about how you can boost your engagement, let’s define it properly.
Engagement includes all shares, likes, and comments you get on your posts. Whenever someone takes action and interacts with your posts or your account is considered engagement.
Engagement shows the quality of your followers. Quality comes over quantity because it’s better to have 100 engaged followers than to have 300 followers that don’t do anything. Engagement rate is calculated by looking at your total engagement, dividing it by the number of your followers, and multiplying by 100.
Your engagement rate should be at least 2% and up to 6%. If you get it even higher, you will see higher returns from your sales and increased customer loyalty.
Talk About Interesting Topics
Lots of brands such as artificial intelligence companies focus only on themselves. They come off as arrogant and like they are the only ones that matter within their industry. Promoting your brand is a good thing, but you shouldn’t do it often and try to impose yourself on the community.
Be topical and talk about news, events, new products, services, or give advice about your industry. Talk to people online about the things they care about and get them to start talking as well. Apart from starting conversations yourself, join other discussions on social media.
This is always an excellent opportunity to show your expertise, recognize customer issues, or simply try to introduce yourself in a fun way. Follow the current trends relevant to your followers, customers, and industry. Here are some exciting topic categories:
- Anecdotes and stories
- Relatable humor
- Challenging and thought-provoking
- Posts in the form of a question
- Data-backed claims
- How-to guides
- Quick-fix posts
- Stories about failure
- Sensational news
Create Relevant Content
Like the way you communicate on social media, your content should be focused on something valuable to your audience. It shouldn’t be exclusively promotional. You should look to promote yourself indirectly by offering content that’s interesting to your followers.
Again it’s about starting conversations, not trying to get a sale through your content. Create content that gives helpful information, gives innovative solutions, and addresses customer pain points. But to do this, you first need to know your target audience to be able to create content that “hits the spot.”
For example, if you are offering custom design t-shirts with your print, you should simply share your designs. Instead, create a blog where you can help people understand how to design their own t-shirt, which design elements go well together, how to choose typography, and so on.
If you are running an electronics business or something similar where customers can have many complex questions, consider creating your virtual communication call center. Fill it with all relevant information and share it when people might find it useful.
Share Content Made by Others
If you want people to give you their trust and engage with your brand, you need to be honest and give something back. It’s not about sharing your content and stories alone. Show that you care about the issues you talk about and have respect when others do something good.
This should include content from regular people, bloggers, influencers, or companies. Naturally, you should share content from your competitors. You can use content that’s not yours to give answers to people’s questions and show that you’re not only about yourself.
People will start following your feed and engage with you regardless if you’re sharing your content or not. What matters to them is that they can get something useful.
Be Active
No matter what your primary goal is on social media is, you need to be active. In the world of social media, months are reduced down to days. Simply put, if you’re not there for a week, people will forget about you entirely, and your engagement rates will drop down by quite a margin.
Share content every day, engage in conversations, like posts, make announcements, etc. Consistency equals reliability on social media. At the same time, many followers that aren’t engaged might be reluctant to get into a conversation.
With each new activity, there is a chance of finally getting them onboard. However, you shouldn’t just be spamming irrelevant things as people won’t take you seriously. Here are some rough numbers on the number of daily posts based on social network:
- Facebook: once per day (maximum 2)
- Twitter: dozen tweets per day
- Instagram: one or two times per day
- Linked: once per day or once in two days
Act Quickly
As we mentioned above, time moves quickly on social media. You need to be present at all times. This means being present each day at least 2-3 times to respond to all comments, direct messages, share content, or post new content.
Make sure to be both proactive and reactive. Simply put, don’t let people wait for a whole day for you to give them an answer. This will disengage them, and chances are they won’t ever talk to you. When it comes to being proactive, when you see an exciting conversation, get involved early on.
Giving your input late won’t do you anything good. Chances are someone has already given a solution to the problem.
Conclusion
Follow this advice, and we guarantee you’ll get increased engagement on social media. Bear in mind that it takes to boost your engagement rate. It’s an ongoing process that requires hard work and an honest approach. If you try to cut corners, your followers will recognize it.
