Social media engagement is an essential metric to consider when building your online brand. Many aim to increase the size of their audience, but they often fail to increase their social media engagement as well. When you engage with your followers on social media you can quickly convert them from fans into customers. The time and effort you put into building meaningful relationships with your audience can lead to more sales, an uptick in customer loyalty, and more positive reviews. This article will show you the importance of social media engagement, how to grow your follower base, and how to increase your social media engagement rates.
Importance of Social Media Engagement
There’s no getting around it, social media engagement helps you strengthen customer relationships. When customers engage with your content or send you a message via social media you’re presented with a chance to get to know your customers and forge a relationship with them. Answer their questions, respond playfully when appropriate, and exceed expectations when it comes to customer service.
Social media engagement also allows you to establish customer loyalty. By helping your customers when they need it, building a relationship with them and offering a unique customer experience, you’ll increase your overall customer loyalty. Customers will further trust your brand because you’ve simply answered their questions. They’ll fall in love with your brand because you’ve laughed with them, expressed your gratitude, and resolved their problems.
You’ll also increase your sales through social media engagement. Through an active presence on social media and responding to customer posts, customers will feel confident making a purchase through your brand. Even if there a negative comments on your page, you can resolve the issue with a quick response. This is a superb way to increase your sales. You can also grow your sales by recommending certain products when asked. Avoid making every response to a customer about your products though. These sales will come naturally.
How to Grow Your Social Media Following
One method to increase your social media engagement is to increase your follower base. It’s not that complicated because numbers don’t lie. The more genuine followers you have, the more engagement you’re likely to receive.
Advertisements
The most common (and expensive) way to grow your follower base is to spend money on promoted or boosted posts. You can also purchase ads to increase your followers on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. While you will grow your followers, they might not have the same level of commitment as someone who discovered your brand through a stellar product advertisement.
Increase Your Social Media Engagement with Unique Content
If you’re just starting out, you’ll want to create unique content. You’ll want to have a blend of your own content and popular content you’ve found elsewhere on the internet. If sharing someone else’s content, always credit them on your page. When it comes to your homegrown content, you can create quote graphics, humorous gifs, viral videos, and more. Generating your content can take time to create. However, with long term effort, you’ll find that you eventually get more shares, which will help you grow your social media following.
Engage with Customers
You can also grow your following by engaging with your customers. An active presence on social media will show that your page is worth following. By posting content on a regular basis and communicating with your followers, people will organically follow your page. You’ll also grow followers when you engage with customers who don’t necessarily follow your brand. They’ll be more likely to follow your page when you build a relationship with them.
Increase Your Social Media Engagement with Consistency
Having a constant theme on your social media accounts can also increase your followers. People are more likely to follow your page if they know what they can expect. A theme can be the type of content you share – funny, inspirational, etc. – or the look of your content – minimalist, colorful, etc. How do you want your brand to be perceived by others? Focus on creating a consistent personality and voice for your content.
Collaborations
Collaborations with other brands can also help grow your follower base. You’ll want to collaborate with other brands that have a similar audience but sell different types of products. For instance, if you sell sports apparel you could collaborate with a brand that sells sports equipment. You’ll be able to tap into each other’s audiences to grow your followers. Collaboration may include a contest, giveaway, blog post promoting their products, or a social media post.
Social Media Tools to Increase Social Media Engagement
Buffer
Buffer is an amazing tool for building and tracking social media engagement. The tool provides the means to automate your social posts at various times. You can schedule up to 10 posts at a time for free, which makes it a great tool for rising entrepreneurs. You can add hashtags (#) to posts and you can also tag relevant brands within Buffer. The tool features a link shortener to allow you a higher word count. You can also include graphics with your posts. The best part about Buffer is that it allows you to track your social media engagement. You can see how many likes, retweets, mentions and click-throughs you garner via your social media posts.
Canva
Canva is hands down one of the best social media tools out there. You can create your own unique content fo reach social network based on accurate dimensions. The tools acts like a user-friendly verison of Photoshop. You can drag, drop, and modify graphics in any way you can imagine. This is a game-changer for social media engagement since having your own content allows you to share relevant content with your audience, which can help boost social media engagement. It also provides a competitive advantage as people will credit you when they share your content.
IFTTT
IFTTT is an awesome social media tool that allows you to automate more of your brand elements. If you post something on Facebook, you can set triggers so that IFTTT reposts the content on your other social media channels. This is a great tool for solopreneurs who may not have the time to develop and automate unique content for each platform. By posting regular content on different networks, you’ll likely increase your social media engagement.
Sniply
Sniply is a tool that simplifies content curation. You can share other people’s content for your social media account. The best thing about this tool is that it creates a backlink to your website on the article page to drive more traffic back to your website. Since you’re sharing other people’s content, you can add more posts to your social media. Doing so will help you grow your followers which will indirectly help grow your social media engagement. By posting regularly you’ll have a better chance of engaging with your audience.
12 Tips to Increase Your Social Media Engagement
1.) Post Content Worth Engaging With to Increase Social Media Engagement
If you want to increase your social media engagement, you have to develop content that people can engage with. It could be a poll on Twitter, a video people can connect with, a graphic that makes people laugh, or a product photo that encourages people to tag their friends.
2.) Respond to All Comments
In order to increase social media engagement, you need to be social too. When customers send you a message or leave a comment, they’re giving you an opportunity to talk with them. Whether they leave a positive or negative message, you should reach out. You can show appreciation for positive messages and suggest a resolution for negative ones. The only time you wouldn’t respond to a post is if someone tags their friend as they’re not directly engaging with you.
3.) Encourage Readers to Comment, Like and Share
When you create a post always add a call-to-action (CTA) at the end. You can ask people to like, comment, and share with their friends. People are far more likely to share a post if you ask them to do so.
4.) Start a Facebook Group
Facebook groups are an awesome way to increase social media engagement. Groups are generally more social than pages as members are free to post their questions at any time. A group allows your customers to engage with each other. This allows them to get to know other people in their niche. You should also be active in your community and strengthen your relationship with others. You should moderate posts within the group to avoid spam, but make sure that your group remains valuable to the community as a whole.
5.) Run Contests and Giveaways
The easiest way to increase social media engagements is to run contests and giveaways. You can ask people to take certain actions such as visit a landing page on your website (make sure you retarget). You can use tools like Rafflecopter, which you can use to grow your social media following and increase social media engagement as contest requirements. You’ll have to give a prize to a winner, but the prize can be expensed by your business.
6.) Use Images in Every Post
According to Buffer, tweets that include images tend to gain 150% more retweets than tweets that don’t include them. Images capture more attention when scrolling through newsfeeds than posts with plain text. Adding relevant images to your post will help encourage more social media engagement.
7.) Get More Followers
Having followers will surely help you increase social media engagement. Those with under 100 followers will receive less engagement overall than brands with tens of thousands. Social media engagement can be a numbers game. If you have a bigger audience, you’ll be more likely to have a higher level of engagement on your posts. You’ll still need to ensure that the quality of your social media posts is high. But it’s a lot easier to receive post engagement when you have a big audience.
8.) Ask a Question
When you post on social media, an easy way to engage your fans is to ask a question. Asking a relevant but fun question is a great way to get your customers to leave a comment on your post. For example, you can create a post that compares two different dresses and ask ‘Which would you rather wear on date night?’ This allows you to incorporate your product into the question while still being playful with your audience.
9.) Post Multiples Time Every Day
In order to increase social media engagement, you’ll need to post regularly on all of your social channels. On average, 2-3 posts per platform per day will help you build an engaged audience. If you post too often, you may annoy your audience, which can result in unfollowers. You’ll also want to post at the best times. On average, 1-3 pm is the best time to post on most social media platforms.
10.) Optimize Your Headlines for Engagement
Your headlines should be captivating yet honest. Whether you’re trying to drive traffic back to your blog post or product page, you should use a tool like CoSchedule to create captivating headlines. CoScheule provides you with the means to optimize your headlines to encourage engagement such as click-through. You’ll receive a score for your headline and can make changes to increase your score. You should aim for a score above 70.
11.) Share Content That’s Relevant to Your Audience
Who are your customers? What are their interests? What types of posts do they respond to the most? How do they consume information? Do they prefer videos, blog content, or image posts? Focus on creating content your customers will enjoy. You’ll likely need to experiment with different types of content in order to see which gets the most engagement. If you notice that videos perform well on your fan pages, then create more video content…it’s really that simple.
12.) Exceed Expectations in Your Interactions
Brands like Netflix flat out crush their social media engagement by interacting with their fans. They’ll regularly kid around with them. That being said, avoid canned responses with your customers. If you routinely offer a fun and casual customer experience on your pages, you’ll likely experience increased social media engagement.
