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How to Increase Social Media Engagement
for Business

Blogs | Social Media

Published: 18.04.22
Written By: Jess Foster

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Table of Contents

Introduction

Ever wonder how to increase social media engagement? Of course, you want to boost your followers, but ultimately, the greatest measure of social media success is an engaged audience.

Any interaction with your content from an audience is considered social media engagement. Most companies and brands crave huge followings but some fall short with their social media strategy.

Social media engagement is measured by a range of metrics that include:

  • Likes
  • Comments
  • Shares, Reposts or Retweets
  • Click-throughs
  • Mentions
  • Hashtags

 

In this article I will be covering how to increase social media engagement for businesses and personal profiles related to multiple social media platforms.

Social Media Services

Why is Social Media Engagement Important?

Just like Google, social media platforms have ranking algorithms to display the most useful yet engaging content. Yes that’s right!

Engagement is a ranking factor on all social media platforms. This means if your content is highly engaged with it is more likely to be shown to new potential followers. Making it crucial to understand engagement and the importance.

Social media experts predict that anything between 1% and 5% is a good engagement rate. These metrics can help shape your strategy to potentially exceed business aims and objectives.

It is near impossible to measurue your engagement and growth if you don’t know where you’re starting from. This makes analysing your current social media platforms for engagement vital as you can see progression.

First take into account your current number of followers, how many people interact with your post such as how many comments and shares you’re getting on average per post. Whatever measurements that are meaningful to you.

Then make sure to keep tracking regularly so that you catch changes in engagement to decide what’s working and what can be improved on.

Select Your Strategy

Since all company’s business goals are different, every company’s social media strategy will be too.

Some different social media goals may be:

  • Changing public perception of your brand
  • Developing new customer leads
  • Collecting feedback about new products
  • Educating your audience with resources and advice

 

Our Tips On Your Social Media Strategy

Step 1: Choose goals that reflect your business objective and are relevant to you.

Step 2: Know your audience (We will come back to this one)

Step 3: Scope out the competition

Step 4: Complete a social media audit

Step 5: Improve profiles – Name, bio’s, address and linking profiles

Step 6: Look and be inspired

Step 7: Create a social media content calendar and stick to it

Step 8: Create quality content people will love

Step 9: Track your performance and progress

Get To Know Your Audience

f people don’t think you are talking to them, they simply won’t engage, meaning that you are losing out on valuable social media engagements.

So, you need to do some audience research…ask yourself…what are my goals? Who is it that I want to engage?

Then you want to try and understand what content and accounts these people are engaging with now, what are they interested at looking at?

This will help you build a clear picture of what you need to do to get your target audience interested and engaging with you.

Create and Share Valuable Content Consistently

Now that you know what your goals are, who you want to follow and engage with you, and what your audience are interested in, you can start creating and sharing valuable content.

Content that is helpful and addresses your audiences needs and problems is critical. So, avoid posting too many product or brand posts that are just about you. They do not encourage engagement.

What encourages social media engagement is content that is useful, informative, or entertaining, essentially it needs to evoke emotion that pushes them to engaging.

Don’t forget to be creative with posts and make sure they are suited to the right social media platform:

  • Text posts
  • Image posts
  • Polls
  • Animated GIFs
  • Highlighting Customers
  • Competitions

Social Media Engagement Tools

Social media is a huge place for your content to get lost. It can be a scary place to tackle on your own. Here I have created my very own list of tools that help with social media engagement:

Photo Editing – Canva/Photoshop
You want your content to be original so that when people interact they become familiar with your brand and can identify your brand through your content.

Video Editing – Premiere Pro/Capcut/Canva
Research suggests videos gain more shares than image/text posts. So it’s important to stand out.

GIFs
Giphy is a huge library of animations that can be added to posts to express emotion. This is a great way to spark conversation amd engagement.

React

Firstly, you need to be reactive, by this I mean you need to be answering all direct messages, incoming mentions, and comments. And you need to be answering them in a timely manner.

In some cases on social media profiles you can be scored on how quick you respond to messages and queries. This may be displayed to users before they engage with your social media profile and may have an effect on whether they decide to engage or not.

Consider social media engagements and interactions a sport such as volleyball. You want to go back and fourth between keeping attention and asking questions.

Be Proactive: Engage First

To grow and see a substantial increase in social media engagement on your own posts and account you need to be proactively engaging with others. You need to be the one to spark conversations.

Follow people first, drop them a message, like and comment on a post of theirs that you love or can relate to, or you have a question about.

When you are engaging remember to be human, people will be more likely to want to engage with a brand account if they think there is a real person at the other end.

To do this you could sign off posts with your name!

Or you could:

  • Answer questions
  • Respond to comments with personal tone
  • Show the people behind the brand with photos and videos

Human Signature

Imagine you are scrolling engaging social media posts and find there is no one to interact with? The content seems to lose it’s flair and personality. 

A lot of companies encourage their social media experts to persoanlly sign-off on the posts they have created. As they should! To be able to engage with users about your content you must understand the purpose, relevance and be proud of the end result. 

Daily Checklist

Now that you have got your company goals, your target audience, your valuable content that you are posting consistently, you need an engagement strategy. Here is my daily checklist so that you can make sure you are consistently engaging in the correct way.

My daily checklist includes:

  • Reply to any messages and comments
  • Message any new followers with a friendly introductory message
  • Like and comment on 5 posts within your feed
  • Engage with any stories
  • Like and comment on 5 posts from relevant hashtags
  • Follow any new people or brands that are relevant

Conclusion

Most social media experts believe anything between 1% and 5% can be considered a good social media engagement rate.

At the end of the day, you just need to be engaging with others in a friendly way alongside supplying valuable content that speaks to your target audience. If you can do this consistently you will start to see growth.

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