Generally, the goal of a marketer is to improve the reach of a business; thereby, boosting its patronage and sales. Although several methods can be used to achieve this goal, using social media platforms is undoubtedly one of the best means. Given this, every marketer needs to maintain exceptional social media engagement that will continue to draw existing and potential clients to a business.
As a marketer, what are the things you need to do to increase social media engagement that can help any business? Check out this detailed guide for marketers.
What does social media engagement entail?
Foremost, we need to explain what social media engagement means before diving into ways to increase it. In simple terms, social media engagement is all about the interaction between the social media account of a brand and its existing or prospective client. This strategy is targeted at promoting the form of relationship that exists between the customers and the brand. Besides, this engagement can go a long way in helping you understand the needs of your customers and how you can help them.
Typically, social media engagement comes in different means based on the particular social media platform concerned. However, it generally includes comments, likes, follows, tweets, retweets, shares, and click-throughs. If you need assistance with getting more likes, followers, retweets, and other forms of engagements for your social media channels, Instant Famous is always ready to help you.
How to increase your social media engagement
Knowing the meaning of social media engagement is not enough; every marketer must learn how to increase it. Here are the strategies you can utilize to increase your social media engagement.
- Determine your goal
Like other activities, social media engagement isn’t something you can just dive into without having a particular goal in mind. Without defining your goal, your engagement may never yield any positive results. So, sit down and think about the things you want to achieve with your social media activities.
Do you intend to get more followers? Are you looking for a way to get feedback on your service, product, or campaign? Do you want to use it to get more leads? Are you using social media to change customers’ perceptions of your brand? Would you like to use it to assist your customers to accelerate their buying journey? These are a few of the possible goals of social media engagement.
- Understand your audience
Most businesses don’t cater to the needs of everybody; they are particularly meant for some people. These people are your audience and you need to know who they are. You have to understand their demography because this will allow you to know how you can present your offer to them. For example, a business that is targeting seniors cannot present its offers the same way another business that focuses on teenagers will do. Therefore, have a full understanding of your audience before you start your social media engagement.
- Create time to engage your audience
While other individuals may participate in social media activities once a while, a marketer doesn’t have that luxury. In other words, a marketer needs to engage their audiences regularly irrespective of their busy schedule. This is because your failure to engage them will take their focus away from you and you may struggle to engage them when next you come online.
As a result of this, you need to create time for engaging your followers. Set aside particular periods of every day to retweet, like comments, reply to comments, share posts, and do other things that will make your audiences see you. For instance, you can choose to engage your audience 4 or 5 times every day.
- Have brand personas
Your brand personas help you understand the needs, problems, pain points, demographics, and goals of your prospective buyers. So, if you don’t have brand personas, it will be difficult for you to give your audience what they want to see, read or watch. While creating your brand personals, learn how your audiences want you to communicate with them.
- Utilize varying tones and voices on different social media platforms
While we have different social media channels, many of these channels serve different purposes. Therefore, using the same tone and voice on all social media platforms may hamper your chances of communicating with your followers effectively.
For instance, Instagram serves as a playful social media platform that many people use to relax and have fun. LinkedIn, on the other hand, comes as a professional channel. While using professional tones and voices that can help you engage your audience on LinkedIn, the same tones and voices will fail on Instagram. Resultantly, know the right tone and voice to use for each channel.
- Post engaging content
It seems everyone understands this particular strategy, but we will still explain it because many marketers fail here. Social media engagement is not just about having a presence on social media channels; you need to post interesting and high-quality content that is suitable for each platform.
If you continue giving your audience boring content, it is just a matter of time before you lose many of them. Therefore, it is your responsibility to look for engaging and high-quality topics that your audiences will be willing to share, retweet, like, and share.
It is worthwhile to note that the content that is deemed to be high-quality on Instagram may not be considered to be the same on LinkedIn. Hence, understanding the followers on each platform and the right tones to use can also play a major role in posting interesting content.
- Take advantage of visual content
Sadly, the attention spans of many social media users are short nowadays, and as such, they don’t have the patience to read long posts. This is especially true for millennials. Fortunately, you don’t necessarily have to post long posts as you can take advantage of videos, infographics, and images to spice up your social media post. You will be surprised by the significant increase in your social media engagement.
- Post frequently
There are no shortcuts to getting better and increased social media engagement. You must post regularly. Notably, this doesn’t mean that you should prioritize the quantity of your content over its quality. Nevertheless, your content must not be too infrequent that your audience hardly remembers you. Failure to post regularly will turn you into a social media ghost. However, you still have to be wise in posting so that you won’t be in the faces of your audience every time.
- Get the right social media management tools
As a marketer, operating several social media channels at the same time can be challenging. Luckily, you can leverage the power of social media management tools to make the work easier for you and get the most out of your engagement. A few of the best social media management tools are Canva, Hootsuite, Giphy, Brandwatch, and Google Hangouts.
- Use the trending events to your advantage
Although you have to post content that is in line with your brand, don’t neglect the trending issues around the world. For instance, during the coronavirus pandemic, every business needs to follow the trend and discuss the pandemic. This may include sharing safety tips from some of the most reputable health organizations in the world or discussing how the issue affects people or your field.
The goal of jumping on trending events is to ensure that you connect with your customers through the events. These events may include sporting events, holidays, trending hashtags, and so on. As a social media marketer, you need to stay up to date with the latest happenings around the world.
- Utilize hashtags
Most social media channels now utilize hashtags (#) as the sign makes it easy for people to find any content that is related to their search. Also, if a particular hashtag is trending, using it can help you attract the attention of more people. So, learn how to use the hashtags and don’t hesitate to take advantage of them when necessary.
- Respond to all comments
Responding to all comments is a good way to show your followers that you are social. Generally, when people comment on a particular content, they want to communicate with you. So, if you don’t reply to their comments, they will feel you don’t want to communicate with them and may not comment on your content when next you post. To avoid such an issue, you need to encourage your audiences and let them know that you value their effort by responding to all comments.
When responding to the comments, you need to be strategic. For positive comments, you need to show a form of appreciation. However, if the comments are negatives, don’t be defensive but you should rather suggest a solution. If the comments tag their friends, you may not need to respond since they are not directing the messages at you.
- Share interesting content of other people or brands
Everyone understands that you are not an island of knowledge. Hence, it will not come as a surprise to anybody if you share the interesting content of another person or brand. If the content helps your audiences in any way, they will appreciate your effort. Also, it can make the creators of the shared content share your interesting posts. Therefore, this strategy is a win-win situation for everyone.
If you want to be a successful marketer, you must go extra miles to increase your social media engagement by following the strategies listed above.
