How to Increase Social Media Engagement: Tips to Use Today

Social media has become a melting pot uniting consumers across all demographics — location, age, gender, etc. Sites like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Twitter provide businesses of all sizes free access to a massive pool of audiences.

However, instead of thinking of how to increase social media engagement, some entrepreneurs don’t give these platforms the time of day. They believe social media marketing is only for mega corporations with millions of dollars in their marketing budget.

On the contrary, social media platforms provide all businesses with a world of opportunity.

Today, seven out of ten Americans use social media sites to buy products, engage with brands, and share information.

If you don’t find ways to increase your social media interactions, you’ll miss out on countless opportunities to grow an online community of existing and potential clients.

In this article, we’re going to give you practical tips to increase your engagement.

Read on to learn how to transform your digital presence and take your business to new heights.

What Is Social Media Engagement?

Social media engagement is the process of measuring the quantity and quality of interactions you get across your accounts. The term includes an extensive range of digital actions, including the following:

• Likes or favorites
• Shares or retweets
• Followers or subscribers
• Mentions
• Hashtags
• Saves
• Clicks

Engagement quality and quantity are reliable ways to measure how much your content resonates with your audience. It is essential in building a meaningful connection with current and potential clients.

Why Use Social Media?

It may take you some time to develop social media marketing strategies, but the advantages are worth it. Here are some of the top reasons for investing in such efforts:

• Increase brand awareness: Social media marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to grow your brand’s visibility. Likes, shares, and tags can exponentially expand a post’s reach.
• Improve inbound traffic: Without social media efforts, you might limit your leads to your existing clientele. Marketing on sites like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and Twitter allows you to tap a wider pool of clients.
• Boost SEO efforts: Gaining popularity on different platforms will help you gain backlinks, which Google considers in ranking sites. Additionally, entrepreneurs witness improved rankings after at least one year of running active social media pages.
• Enjoy higher conversion rates: The more people you reach with groundbreaking content, the more opportunities you create to convert clients. Interacting with your audience personifies your brand, making them think of you when they need your products or services.
• Enhance authority: If you consistently create valuable content, your audience will start to trust you. This action is one of the first steps to developing brand loyalty, where clients spend more on your products or services and tell other people about your company.

If you haven’t built a social media plan with engagement strategies yet, now is the perfect time to start. Doing so can help you reach success levels you didn’t think were possible before.

Editor’s Note: We created a downloadable workbook called The 13 Week Content Planner to help you plan out a full 13 weeks or 1 quarter’s worth of content for your business.

Pro Tips to Maximize Engagement

Now that you know the importance of social media engagement to your business, it’s time to maximize yours. We put together a list of seven practical tips to boost your engagement.

1. Determine Your Audience

The first piece of advice might sound like a tip straight out of a marketing 101 class, but many business owners usually forget it. It’s essential to determine your audience to increase engagement.

Here are some factors to consider:

• Location
• Age
• Gender
• Interests
• Preferred social media platforms

Once you decide who you want to target, you can choose the ideal sites and content that will resonate with them. Here are some statistics in using the top platforms:

• Facebook is a social networking site with 223 million American users. Except for kids aged 17 and below, you can use this platform to reach your audience, particularly the 25-34 market.
• Instagram is a photo and video sharing site with 107 million American users. Using this platform is ideal for businesses targeting individuals aged 18-54.
• Youtube is an online video platform with 126 million American users. Because of the popularity of videos, you can use this platform for any age group if you have the means to maintain a channel.
• Twitter is a microblogging site with 69 million American users. You can use this platform to tap clients aged 18-49.

After choosing your audience, the ideal next step is to develop buyer personas — detailed representations of your target market. This step will help you create content that will resonate with your audience.

2. Set Your Goals

The next step to increasing your social media engagement is to set simple, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound (SMART) goals. Without them, it would be challenging to measure your success.

Think like a data analyst and determine what’s important to you. You can consider elements like followers, viewers, or likes.

Going back to your SMART goals, you should set specific objectives for different sites.

For example, you can aim to gain 1,000 new Instagram followers in one month, with an average of 200 views per video.

3. Implement Content Marketing Strategies

Content marketing is a marketing branch that deals with creating and distributing content that excites, informs, and influences your audience. It is a powerful digital marketing tool that can help you achieve your social media engagement goals.

The operative word for this marketing branch is valuable. It aims to connect with audiences on a personal level. If you practice content marketing, you encourage your online community to watch, read, like, comment, and share your posts, leading to an enlarged reach.

For example, if you own a clothing business, you can’t keep posting about your products, styles, and prices daily. You have to develop creative ways to inform and entertain your audiences, such as contests, polls, infographics, testimonials, listicles, etc.

Here are some best practices you can follow:

• Use multiple platforms: In today’s highly digitized world, being on one channel is no longer effective for brands. Use the ideal sites for your audience and consistently post valuable content there.
• Be consistent: No matter what channel you use, you should use the same style, tone, and messaging. Your consumers should have a similar experience across all your preferred social media sites.
• Produce video content: In a recent study, 74% of marketers claim videos have a higher return on investment (ROI) yield than static images. A whopping 68% of participants from the same group claimed videos lead to higher ROI versus Google Ads.
• Consider live streaming: An edited video may lead to more engagement, but going live boosts your visual strategy. It’s an effective personalization method that strengthens your relationship with clients.

If you need content marketing inspiration, check out Red Bull’s Youtube channel. Everybody knows Red Bull sells energy drinks, but its page showcases exhilarating extreme sports videos that attract millions of viewers.

Editor’s Note: Are your campaigns making you profit? Use our real-time Advertising ROAS Calculator to plan your campaigns and never guess on your advertising ROAS again!

4. Stay Relevant

f there’s a trending topic relevant to your brand and target market, join in on the conversation. Here are some ways to hop in on current fads:

• Check for trending Twitter topics and make a statement about issues that relate to your brand.
• Participate in dance challenges and random acts of kindness in your content.
• Create posts and stories about sporting events or awards nights.

5. Communicate with Your Audience

One of the fastest ways to establish rapport with your audience is to communicate with them on your social media sites.

Replying to comments, answering DMs, and thanking them for sharing posts should be part of your communication, but there’s more to it than that! These examples follow a reactive strategy, which is okay at best.

If you want to engage with your audience, you should build a proactive approach.

Here’s a pro tip:

• Initiate interactions instead of waiting for them.

For example, create thought-provoking copy that asks questions, suggests tags, and encourages comments. You can even take things a notch higher and send out personalized birthday, anniversary, or graduation greetings.

6. Post Consistently

The typical American sees up to 10,000 digital ads daily — and that doesn’t include posts, stories, and updates. If you go weeks without posting on your social media sites, you give your competitors many opportunities to attract your existing and potential clients.

On the other hand, there is a thing such as too much. Bombarding your pages with too much unnecessary information might lead your audience to unfollow or block you.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to posting frequency, but you should always aim to be the top-of-mind brand for your clientele. The secret to a winning frequency is posting enough valuable content to keep your audience interested.

7. Measure Results

The last step in creating social media engagement strategies is to measure results. To know if you’re spending your marketing budget wisely, you should measure your ROI.

Here are some results you can track to determine your strategies’ success:

• Audience size: A crucial number to track is your followers and subscribers, which you can do monthly. When you start losing viewership, you should determine ways to gain those lost followers back.
• Followed accounts: In any platform, it’s best to keep the accounts you follow to a minimum. Having 50 followers but following 500 accounts might discourage potential clients from interacting with you.
• Likes and shares: Tracking these figures will give you a sense of how much your existing audience enjoys a particular post. Later on, these figures will help you determine which content types resonate well with your target market.
• Active fans: It’s nice to have thousands of fans, but keep track of active ones. They are the ones who will likely become loyal customers if they aren’t already.
• Paid results: These refer to ads and sponsored messages to your target market. Facebook provides detailed reports of the effectiveness of paid efforts, including views, likes, and engagement.
• Clicks: Social media pages will also provide you with information on content that your audience opens. Keep track of the most clicked links to determine topics your audience enjoys.
• Lead generation: Your efforts should include attracting potential clients. Find out how many of your site visitors come from your social media sites and which platforms generate the most revenues.

Achieve Your Social Media Goals Now

Social media marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways to generate leads, convert clients, and increase sales. With over 230 million Americans on social platforms, you should invest in learning how to increase social media engagement.

Creating a social media strategy involves setting your goals, developing valuable content, and measuring results. No matter what size your company is, using such a digital tactic can help you take your business to the next level.

If you need help transforming your digital presence, book a meeting with us now. It’s the fastest way to achieve your online marketing goals!