Social media is a powerful tool to benefit your business for so many reasons from brand awareness, increasing brand loyalty and generating new sales and enquiries from your target audience.
To reap the benefits of social media an important element is having a clear social media engagement strategy. Our blog post will firstly expand on the different metrics which are part of your social media engagement. This will help to identify if your current engagement efforts are working for your business.
We will also go into detail on tips for improving social media engagement across your social media channels which can be included as part of your social media engagement strategy.
Gemma Finch
Social Media & Paid Ad Specialist at 1PCS Creative. Love engaging and impactful social content, family time with my little girl and helping companies grow and build their presence online.
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Engaging On Social Media
There are many elements which contribute to your social media engagement. Here are the main engagement metrics which can be viewed within your analytics tools.
- Likes
- Comments
- Shares
- Mentions
- Direct Messages
- Followers
- Landing page clicks
We would recommend regardless of whether you are a small business or a large business with a dedicated marketing team to use social media engagement tools to understand fully how your social media accounts are performing with your audience insights.
Having a high follower count is only one element, it is far better to have a good quality engaged audience of a smaller follower size than an audience engagement which is low. An engaged audience will build relationships and improve customer loyalty.
It will also increase your opportunity with prospective customers. When social platforms can see more engagement on your posts, they show your post to a wider audience which will boost your reach on the social platform.
Post Consistently
Treat your followers of your social media accounts for your business with the same approach you would your friends. If you only speak with your friends now and again, long term that would impact your friendship with them.
Recommend to post regularly so you can continue to build strong relationships with your followers and audience. Make sure to keep your social pages up to date with feed posts, instagram stories and use a mixture of video content and relevant images to keep your engagement rate high with valuable content for your followers.
Brand Voice
As part of the social media strategy for your business, an important element is the tone and voice used when creating content. Particularly if you have multiple people posting to social media platforms for your brand pages.
Your brand voice will vary depending on your target demographic, culture and approach with your business. For example Disney have an upbeat, fun and positive brand voice whereas a business such as a law firm or an accountant would likely want to have a professional and informative approach with their brand voice.
This should be considered not only during content curation but also for more one to one interactions with social media users such as in Twitter chats, Facebook groups and incoming messages. The aim is to have a consistent tone of voice across all social media platforms.
Relevant Content
Whilst we recommend to post regularly, it is important any social media post published is relevant content for your followers. Social engagement will only increase if you have a deep understanding of what your potential customers are likely to interact with and find interesting.
Firstly look at other social media accounts which are relevant for your industry to see what has and hasn’t worked for them to take learnings from for your own social media feed. Ensure any content creation is your own original content to boost engagement.
Our recent blog post with tips and advice on how to create engaging content may also help with giving ideas for your business.
Providing informative content is a great way to encourage engagement such as useful tips and advice to help your audience. This may lead to them sharing or commenting on the post to find out more information or add their own opinion on the content. We expand on this further below.
Social Media Polls and Questions
Some examples of ways for boosting engagement include to create polls to get people talking. This could be something topical that is relevant which has been in the news recently or around an interesting fact. People enjoy engaging social media posts which grab their interest to answer a question in the hope of getting the question right.
Another approach when you create content is to ask social media users a question. For example if you were sharing a short video of behind the scenes of a project. Ask your followers what they think of it so far or their opinion on a before and after.
People engage with topics that are of interest to them on social channels. If your social media marketing plan includes aiming for the team to have deeper relationships with customers to improve your customer loyalty.
Then post content featuring your team which involves your audience will help to increase engagement and in the way you are aiming for. For example ‘guess who in the team has had a session ticket to Liverpool since they were 18?’
Scheduling Posts
Use analytics tools to identify popular times when your followers are on each social media platform. Whilst this isn’t a black and white rule, posting during the most popular times can help boost social media engagement.
For example some social media platforms look at the engagement metrics for the first 60 minutes, the higher engagement rate the more it will show your social post which directly will impact your reach on the social media platform.
Using a social media calendar will also help your business to monitor if you are posting regularly and have a wide enough variety in topics and content to help your engagement rate. If posts are too similar this will lose the interest of your followers on the social network.
Be Proactive
Doing social media posts alone is not enough to achieve higher engagement. Being responsive to any comments, mentions, direct messages or interactions and in a timely manner is important on social media. Treat it in the same way you would respond to emails and calls for your business.
As your engagement increases it is likely people will share content from your page. It will further build on that relationship and consequently boost your social media engagement to thank them for sharing your content. Or if receive a nice comment on your post content to add a personalised response.
Similarly if you are mentioned in customer posts, for example they might tag your business wearing or sharing their purchase from you on a post, you equally could share this or comment in your relevant tone of voice. To be proactive we would recommend with any interactions to aim to respond within 24 hours.
We hope our blog post has given you useful tips to help increase your social media engagement. At 1PCS Creative we provide outsourced social media management, our team can look after all your content creation and responding to any comments or messages too to help increase your social media engagement.
Feel free to get in touch to discuss further with our team to see how we can help your business with outsourcing your social media. Our team are more than happy to help.