One of the biggest buzzwords in social media marketing is engagement. Businesses irrespective of their scale and size want to crack the code of boosting engagement and get their audiences talking.
To get your audience to engage with your business you need to ask the right questions and address their challenges. But how do you do that?
In this post, we will decode everything you need to know about social media engagement and how you can achieve it for your business.
Contents
Be social!
People buy from people, not brands. The rule of thumb here is to humanise your brand.
Imagine being at a social event. To be engaging, you might have to mingle with the crowd and exchange your thoughts. Right? The same goes for social media as well.
People like to think and express their opinions. While, using a tone like “Follow us, or “Like our page”, may come across as too authoritative, asking “What do you think“ or “Tell us about your thoughts” can get you the desired response.
The audience likes to hear from other thinkers too. Certainly, they want other people to know what they think. That’s exactly what you want going on your social media. Be the anchor to elicit meaningful conversations.
Try encouraging your audience with one of the following “What do you think?” content strategies:
- Probe their personality: Post a question that invites people to share their opinion or evaluate something
- Take the trivia route: Play the “test your knowledge” game, create a quiz/challenge. It always works 😀
- Post a poll: It’s easy to create polls on Twitter and Facebook
In addition to engaging your followers, you stand to learn meaningful things about them too.
Be agile to react to your followers’ comments/feedback. Every follower matters and if you value them, they will too!
Deliver value
It’s important to know that going viral doesn’t necessarily mean engagement if it’s not adding any value to your brand or your customers.
Engagement and value are best buddies. Users will only engage with your content if they find something of utility.
Some useful content ideas to engage prospective customers could include blog posts, videos, infographics, downloadable guides, mini-courses, helpful email sequences, webinars, and much more.
The key here is to understand your target audiences’ challenges and then offer a solution. Your content should act as a lead magnet, prompting customers to engage with your content.
The idea is to let your potential customers experience your resources and have a strong reason to come back.
So, don’t be shy to showcase your strengths, USPs and talk about what makes you different.
For instance, if data analysis is your strength, offer a detailed trend report to your audience as a downloadable. If your business is good at training/coaching, let your audiences know about your free training webinars.
Know the algorithm game
Not all platforms measure social media engagement the same way. Familiarise yourself with the unique algorithms, so you know how to boost engagement.
Consider your post timing as well. While there is no “best” time to post for everyone, you can dig into your audience insights to strategically plan your content calendar when your followers are most active.
Check into how other actions impact your chances of social media engagement.
For example, Instagram loves when you use Instagram Stories- add a question, use more stickers, so it will show your posts more often to regular story viewers.
On Facebook, posts with videos receive 200% more engagement than text-only static posts.
For Twitter, hashtags are everything — adding topical hashtags to tweets can increase engagement by as much as 85 %. (Source: Buffer)
In Closing
People don’t use social networks for a one-way experience, they are seeking connections.
Therefore, use your social media channels as a place to engage, share and build a community. Don’t hesitate to show your business’s human side. Know your audience, understand their challenges and prompt their opinions to start meaningful conversations.
Happy socialising! 🙂
If you need a hand with boosting your social media strategy, we are more than happy to discuss it. Connect with us for a quick chat or drop your thoughts down below in the comments.
