Every business promotes its brand on different social media channels with the aim of establishing a strong digital presence, increasing engagement rates and improving overall revenue. However, getting multiple likes, good reactions, comments and shares is something that businesses strive to achieve.
As social media engagement plays an important role in deciding the impact a business makes in the market, using the right strategies is a must. When combined with good-quality content, it can create a domino-effect for the business and significantly boost its brand awareness, leading to improved conversions.
If you are looking for ways to increase your social media engagement, here are 10 easy ways that will help you achieve your goals.
Understand the importance of social media engagement
Although social media is free to use, businesses have to invest time, money and resources to make an impact. Some of the common benefits of social media engagement include greater brand awareness, increased brand influence, enhanced reach, better customer service and improved collaboration. Depending on the social media platforms you are using, you can prioritize your goals and create strategies to get the most out of your social media posts.
Establish your brand voice
The tone that you use in your social media conversations will represent your brand’s personality. Thus, try to build and maintain an authentic brand voice throughout all your social media platforms. Audience trust brands who use a polite tone and post flawless content. For example, posting a content with multiple grammar errors can make the audience doubt the authenticity of your content. They may also lose trust in your brand and get diverted to other brands.
To avoid this, you can use a grammar checker before posting any content online. This will highlight all the inconsistencies in grammar, spelling and punctuation and offer suggestions to improve them and maintain your brand voice.
Share valuable content
Audiences are more interested in engaging with content that will add value to their lives. To boost your social media engagement, share valuable and informative content in the form of blog posts, short videos or info graphics. The best way to find out the interests of your customers is by identifying the common pain points or queries that they ask.
Use these as a topic for your content and address all their concerns. Sharing content on a regular basis will also help you gain the attention of the audience and keep them engaged for a long time.
Use attractive graphics
Audiences are likely to share the content that makes them feel connected. Instead of posting only blog posts or bullet points, add some graphics such as images or videos to your social media posts.
With good visual content, you can trigger the minds of your audience and make an instant connection. However, to make the images and videos more engaging, add a short summary of text or a caption.
Create a social media calendar
A social media calendar will tell you about all the upcoming festivals, key holidays and seasonal topics. Based on the location of your business, mark all the important dates for which you can create content and share it with your audience.
Content posted for holidays such as Halloween or Christmas can get instant likes and shares. Use your creativity to align the content with your products and services and get the attention of your audience.
Add relevant hashtags
To encourage the audience to interact with your content, you will first have to improve its visibility. By adding relevant hashtags, you can make your content discoverable. For example, people search for new content by typing hashtags, location or the name of the brand.
Whenever you post any content, make sure to include a set of different hashtags that are relevant to your brand name, products, services, industry, area of operation, etc. However, using too many irrelevant hashtags will bring an unresponsive audience to your page.
Ask questions
Several social media users use the ‘Ask me anything’ feature on Instagram to interact with their audience. By adding this feature to your stories, you can give your audience an opportunity to voice their queries. Asking open-ended questions will inspire potential customers to engage with your content.
Additionally, you can take polls between two different products or services to know the interests of your audience. For example, if you run an e-commerce store of gift items, then you can post two different products and ask your audience which product they would prefer to gift as an anniversary present.
Be proactive
Photo by cottonbro from Pexels
Being proactive on social media is another way to boost engagement. To get good results, you will have to respond to the comments, direct messages and queries of your audience. Whether your customers post a negative or positive comment, respond to it in a polite tone.
This will enhance collaboration and will help you in build reliable long-term relationships with your audience. You can also initiate social media conversations by finding posts with relevant hashtags or participating in Facebook forums.
Host competitions
Audiences engage more with brands who regularly host competitions or offer giveaways. To inspire the audience to engage with your brand, you can host competitions where they can use your products in the foreground and promote them on their social media profiles by tagging your business.
The post with the most likes and comments can be chosen as a winner. Similarly, you can ask your audience to give a shout-out to your brand and randomly pick 3 winners. Giving freebies, discount cards or gift vouchers will encourage the audience to participate in the competition. It will also increase the reach of your brand to a wide range of audiences.
Monitor your campaigns
No matter how many campaigns you run on social media, failing to monitor them will make your marketing strategies less efficient. Use social media analytics to continuously monitor the performance of your posts. This will tell you which posts garnered more engagement and which ones did not. Based on the reports, you can tweak your content or ditch some strategies and use the best approach for your brand.
