Let’s face it, sustaining social media engagement these days (especially for brands) can be quite a challenge. With so much going on online, grabbing and keeping your audience’s attention can be difficult. If you hope to receive any kind of engagement, your content needs to be genuinely good. You also need to know the likes and dislikes of your audience implicitly.
Journey with us as we take a deep dive into some of the most underrated strategies that marketers use to encourage social media engagement. But first, let’s explore what engagement on social media means and why it’s important.
What is engagement on social media?
Engagement on social media is when people see and choose to interact with your content on social media. This could be in the form of likes, comments and shares. Other types of social media engagement include:
- Retweets (now reposts)
- Followers
- Click-throughs
- Mentions (either tagged or untagged)
- Using branded hashtags
Why does social media engagement matter?
When you see high social media engagement from your followers, it’s an indication that you are serving helpful, informative, entertaining, engaging, and relevant content. When your audience is engaged, they naturally want to spend more time on the platform, which is good for social media algorithms.
TikTok for instance, wants people to spend as much time as possible on their app because getting people’s attention and keeping it is key for them. So TikTok will boost your reach if it recognises that your brand makes quality content that captures people’s attention, and by extension, boosts time spent on the platform.
Think of it as a symbiotic relationship between your brand and the algorithm. Everybody wins!
But the inverse can also be true. If your content does poorly, it can be easy to blame the algorithm. However, it might not always be the algorithm. The truth might be that your content just doesn’t resonate with your audience, and that can be a hard pill to swallow. The best thing to do, if that is the case, is to learn from past mistakes and keep moving forward.
4 tips to increase your social media engagement
Now that you know what social media engagement is and why it’s important, it’s time to find out what it takes to achieve those highly coveted engagement rates that you see other well-known brands effortlessly achieving.
Here are four strategies designed to encourage deeper connections with your followers and increase social media engagement for your brand.
1. Analyse your current engagement metrics
To start off with, have a look at your current engagement metrics to determine where you are at. Take note of which social posts or campaigns performed the best and note the ones that did the worst (yes, those are important to analyse too). This is because posting negative, irrelevant or clumsy content can damage your brand, and potentially cause you to lose valuable followers.
Next, identify any patterns. Look at all messages, comments and mentions to identify the most common comments and questions. You might identify a pattern and decide to make a post addressing and answering those specific questions.
Next, use your data to identify brand advocates, those die-hard loyal fans who sing your brand’s praises every chance they get. These fans will typically always like or comment on your posts.
If they happen to be influencers with an already large following, then ask them about the possibility of a collaboration.
2. Create a social media strategy geared towards engagement
If engagement is something that your brand struggles with, get to work developing a social media-dedicated engagement strategy to support your engagement goals. You don’t need to create a whole new strategy, just one section that compliments your current social media strategy.
To get started, decide on your engagement goals which may look something like this:
- Changing the public perception of your brand
- Attracting new followers, and by extension, customers
- Collecting customer feedback about products or services
- Educating your audience using resources and advice
Next, it’s time to come up with some content ideas that fulfil these well-defined goals. Once you are satisfied, go ahead and incorporate them into your existing social media content calendar for a seamless social media user experience.
3. Know your audience
It’s hard to engage people if your brand doesn’t know who it’s talking to. The sort of language, tone and content that resonates with an ice cream brand’s audience is going to be very different from a designer shoe brand’s audience. This is where conducting audience research comes in handy. It lets you learn everything you need to know about your target audience. Their likes, dislikes, pain points, motivations and more.
Knowing your target audience will also help you with deciding on:
- What social media sites to be on
- When to publish your content
- What types of content to create
- Your brand voice and tone
4. Create value-added content
Content that is helpful and addresses your audiences’ needs and pain points is crucial. So when you create content, create it with a conversation in mind, not a broadcast. An even better approach is to create content that gives your audience what they want before they ask for it. This will spark conversation and social media engagement in no time.
The reality is that people don’t care how great your brand is until they learn what it can do for them. So educate them. Announce that sale that they can’t afford to miss out on, explain why your brand’s software solves their problem, and show them how your anti-ageing product reverses fine lines and wrinkles after just two weeks (provided it’s true of course 😃).
Make your content so enticing and entertaining that they just can’t look away! In turn, compelling them to share it with their friends and family because it’s just that good not to be shared!
Need help with coming up with an effective engagement strategy for your brand? Contact us today, and let’s step up your social media engagement game!
