Engaging an audience on social media can be quite a task if you’re a beginner. Follow the tips listed in this blog and know all about how to increase your engagement and you’ll be on top of your game!
But before we begin, let’s understand what social media engagement is and its importance.
What is Social Media Engagement?
Social Media Engagement is a measure of how your audience is interacting with your social media accounts and the content you post. It is just a metric to evaluate your social media performance which does not necessarily include a rise in sales.
In short, it is a measurement of likes, comments and shares.
Given below are examples of the simple strategies used by Amazon Prime and Dominos to increase their engagement.
Running a business online demands new innovative ideas to catch the audiences’ eye. One may face challenges to get their business in the spotlight if they are not well-versed with social media platforms. Thus, a social media marketing course can be of great help for you to get started!
Importance of Social Media Engagement
To begin with, Social Media Engagement is the key element to attract a large number of followers and create brand awareness.
Marking your brand’s online presence via strong social media engagement will help your business to attract new customers and retain existing customers.
Interacting and engaging with your audience can bring about positive reviews from customers. For example, people find it appealing when a brand responds publicly to customer service requests, complaints from customers or even spark a random conversation.
Thus, engagement is the simplest way to know your audience and learn how you can improve your customers’ experience. Lastly, retaining customers in a business is a skill one must possess profusely!
In fact, not only social media engagement, but engagement on digital media overall is very important today. Digital marketing has the ability to transform the graph of a business’s future and thus learning digital marketing should be on the list of every marketer.
Now, how do we define the social media engagement rate?
Social Media Engagement Rate is nothing but the measure of the amount of active interaction (likes, comments, shares, saves, mentions) received by your content relative to the total audience.
You can know your engagement rate by applying the simple formula: Total reach of the post divided by Total engagement and multiplied by 100.
Let’s now look at 5 hacks that you can follow and easily increase your social media engagement.
5 Hacks to Increase Social Media Engagement Organically in 2021
1. Be Social
The more you connect with people, the more people will connect with you.
As a business owner, the more time you spend building relationships with your audience, the more you will generate higher sales, higher positive reviews, and increase your customer loyalty.
The foremost way to increase your social presence is by responding to all comments that your customers leave on your posts, whether good or bad. You also need to respond to all text messages that you receive from time to time.
Building a good relationship with other brands or business owners and promoting their brands on your social media also gives you a chance to expose your brand to a wider audience.
Moreover, a fun way to increase engagement can be by creating polls and asking interesting questions to your followers, which will also help you know your customers’ tastes and preferences.
Knowing your audience puts you in a position to organise giveaways and discounts during festive seasons and holidays!
2. Post Daily
To increase your social media engagement, you need to post daily. Posting infrequently can lead you to lose customers and people may unfollow you.
It is best to be present in front of your customers at all times.
The number of posts that you should put up per day must be at least 2. Create visual and video content that is original, appealing and relevant to your audience. You can also link your posts to daily events to receive more engagement.
Including images in all your posts is a great way to increase engagement. According to Twitter, 35% of tweets with images receive re-tweets and 37% of Facebook posts with images receive more engagement.
Knowing what kind of content your audience prefers may take time. You need to keep experimenting with different types of content like videos, images, stories and see which one gets the most engagement.
A few tools you can use to create posts are Canva, Crello and Pixtellor.
3. Post at Active Hours
Your followers are not active at all times. Posting at odd times may result in you losing out on potential engagement opportunities.
Note the timings, when you’re receiving the most engagement and schedule your posts for different hours of the day. The best time can differ according to time zones and the demographic distance of your audience.
Schedule your timings efficiently. Set aside time to create posts on weekends. Fix a time daily to respond to all messages and comments on all your accounts.
The best times to post on Instagram are usually 8-9a.m and 2-3p.m. whereas, for tweets and Facebook posts, you can post between 12-4p.m.
Source: blog2social.com
An effective way to increase engagement on your posts is to include a call to action at the end of your posts. A call to action will remind followers to take action and react to your posts and not just simply scroll past them.
You can include a catchy caption or include a funny image that provokes the audience to respond and share their thoughts.
At the end of the posts, also use trending hashtags that are most relevant to your content. You can use hashtagify.me to search for currently trending hashtags.
4. Have a Consistent Theme
Having a consistent theme on all your social media accounts is extremely essential to retain your followers. As widely known, the colour scheme is an important factor for the success of any brand.
Using colours that resonate with your brand, can make your brand look confident and appealing to the audience.
5. Use Analytics to your advantage
To increase your social media engagement, a business owner must know where their business stands. They need to be aware of their potential and existing reach.
Gathering analytics like, which types of posts receive the most likes, comments or shares, at what time the posts are receiving the highest number of responses, the gender of your audience are a few key elements to keep in mind.
Another factor to consider is that your audience’s responses may vary from platform to platform and so will the timings. Here, age can be an important factor to keep in mind.
Using social media analytics tools may be a great help to your business. Google Analytics, HubSpot and HootSuite are a few free social media analytics tools that you can use.
Key Takeaways
Boosting your social media engagement will require time, consistency and attention. However, do not give up and stick to the above-mentioned methods.
Every business is unique and so is its audience. Hence, choosing the right social media platform for your business is important to fetch sales and orders your way. Improving your social media strategies and focusing on content appreciated by your audience can help you gain engagement rates and convert followers into customers.
We hope you enjoyed reading this blog. Will you be adopting these 5 hacks to increase your social media engagement? Let us know in the comment section below.
Author’s Bio
Founder and CEO at IIDE
An ‘Edupreneur’ and the founder of IIDE – Indian Institute of Digital Education.
He is a passionate public speaker and teacher for over 10 years. He has trained over 1,00,000+ students and 25+ corporates in Digital Marketing via online and offline channels. He is a Harvard alumnus specialising in E-commerce. He is a TEDx speaker and is a visiting faculty at India’s top management institutes like the IIMs.