Increasing your social media engagements will help your brand attract more visitors and increase your visibility with your targeted audience. Social media is the biggest platform that can attract the attention of people of all ages. Even if people do not always meet with their loved ones, they can communicate with many people they want thanks to social media. For example, someone who wants to share bad or good news can communicate with a close friend on social media. Likewise, a communication bridge can be established between professionals dealing with the same topics on social media platforms such as LinkedIn. Besides, entertaining content on social media is often needed to relieve stress and tiredness at the end of the day.
Social media, which occupies a larger place in people’s lives with the Covid-19 pandemic, is also important for many businesses and marketers. Many small businesses can create growth strategies with social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. Many people aware of social media’s impact on marketing aim to increase their social media engagements.
A Brief Explanation of Social Media Engagement
Social media engagement is used to determine how and how often people interact with your social media accounts and content. Engagement is a great way to tell if the content created is making an impact on audiences. Some social media engagements include:
- Likes
- Comments
- Direct messages
- Replies
- Mentions/tags
- Shares and Retweets
- Views
- Clicks
- Saves
Why is It Important?
A social media account with low engagement, especially for business areas, has no meaning. Social media posts with higher engagements may get more reach. As social media account engagement increases, the reached audience also increases, and growth occurs. From a psychological point of view, people’s trust in businesses increases with the increase in engagement and the number of followers.
According to a study by Statista, it is expected that there will be more than 243 million social network users in the USA by 2025. Therefore, the use of social media has an increasing trend.
Figure 1: A clever social media post can earn you hundreds of likes & comments with a simple design.
While the increase in social media interaction sometimes does not have a commercial purpose, sometimes it can also provide an excellent source of income. Today, many people carry out their business and marketing strategies through social media. Considering that social media accounts is metaphorically a generator for these businesses and marketers, engagements are the source that feeds this generator. As the source keeps coming, the generator continues to run and can spread to reach more people. Eventually, this brings growth to a business. Eventually, the reason why social media interaction is important in the business and marketing field can be briefly summarized as follows:
– Increase in the awareness of the brand or individual.
For instance, when a customer likes a brand’s posts, that customer’s friends or followers can reach that post as well. When this situation begins to spread, the recognition of this brand will increase. In this way, the brand will be displayed on more people’s pages thanks to social media engagement that includes likes, comments, and shares.
– More affordable than traditional advertising.
In traditional advertising, a limited number of people can be reached by printing flyers and brochures. This method is both costly for the brand and often harmful to the environment due to unnecessary printing.
On the contrary, advertising through social media engagements is less costly and not harmful to the environment. For example, a retweet on Twitter or a share on Instagram allows brands or marketers to reach many potential customers. Thus, these people can introduce themselves without much effort.
– Proves the reliability of the brand or marketer.
The impact of social media engagements on people should never be underestimated. The number of likes or shares in a post is not just a number. Social media engagements ensure that the perception of potential customers is more positive and increases the trust in the brand.
When a business page on social media appears to have a large fan base, this is evidence of a kind of satisfaction reference. As a result, if people didn’t trust this brand, they wouldn’t like and comment on that brand’s posts.
– Affects search engine optimization (SEO) and algorithm.
As a result of increased engagements on social media platforms, Google’s rate of reporting a traffic source to channels increases even more. Likewise, it affects algorithms on social media platforms. The more likes and shares, the more prominent the business or marketer.
– Provides helpful feedback.
For example, a customer who has a problem with the service offered by a brand may bring this issue through comments or shares. This social media engagement can enable the brand to realize the problem with itself and take its service to a better level. Likewise, with engagements in social media, brands can be motivated by seeing how successful they are in their work.
– Emphasizes the humanistic approach.
People warm up to businesses or marketers where they find a piece of themselves. Brands that have only financial interests and are no different from robots can drive away potential customers. When a brand engages with audiences politely, that brand stays in the minds of customers and grabs their attention.
– Increases market reach on social media.
Social media is used all over the world and it allows companies to reach customers wherever they are located. So, a business or marketer can expand its reach by engaging with many potential customers with increased interactions.
Social media engagements play a very important role in brand reliability, brand recognition, and expanding marketing reach. An increase in engagements indicates that a brand or marketer’s social media strategy is working.
Best Ways to Boost Social Media Engagements
Social media engagements can increase or decrease from time to time. These changes may be due to:
- Type of social media platform used
- Updates on the social media platform used
- Description and type of business the marketer has. For example, engagements in business accounts on food and beauty may differ.
- Time of day in posts shared on social media.
- Weather changes. People spend more time outside on sunny days and pay less attention to their phones.
- Seasonality. For instance, posts made on days such as sports competitions, the Olympics, public holidays, Christmas, and school holiday periods can reach more people than on other days.
- The type of content shared and the effectiveness of the content
- Calls to action are used in the content through clicks. Engagement rates increase with each click.
- Social and cultural conditions. With the end of the quarantine during the pandemic period in many countries, there has been a decrease in engagement rates.
- Changes in the social media algorithms
POV: You’re a pizza all cozy in your box & on your way with contactless delivery
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\________________/— Domino’s Pizza (@dominos) May 20, 2020
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— Tiffany & Co. (@TiffanyAndCo) May 13, 2020
Figure 2: Funny post of Dominos and rich design of Tiffany.
Reaching a large audience and increasing social media engagements play an important role in the growth of businesses. Here are a few examples of strategies that can increase social media engagements and audience:
1. Engagement level control
Social media engagement is like a measurement of comments and likes on posts. Engagements are independent of the size of the audience. For example, if a brand with a lot of followers has less engagement, it will have less recognition. However, even if its audience is not large, a brand with high engagement rates can expand its marketing area even more.
To develop a solution, it is first necessary to determine what the problem is. Before developing tactics that will increase social media engagement, it should be looked at the current engagement rates. The current number of likes, comments, and followers should be examined, and the missing parts should be noted. A strategy should be developed with all of these in mind.
2. Establishing a social media strategy
Social media strategy includes how a business or marketer uses social media to achieve its growth goals, what platforms it adopts, and the tools it uses. Develop different strategies for each audience. To create a social media strategy, the following are required:
- First, clearly define the goals and vision of the brand.
- Determine the purpose and subject, and the target audience.
- Conduct a study or research on the demographics of the targeted audience. After, developed a content strategy appropriate for the audience.
- Choose the right social media platform to share the content. Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn are among the most preferred platforms.
- After determining the times when the audience is active, the posts should be shared at the most appropriate time.
- Finally, the types of content with the highest engagement should be analyzed and such content should continue to be produced.
3. Knowing your target audience can increase social media engagements
Content produced for an audience whose wishes and expectations are unknown can also be ineffective. The language and resources used by businesses serving in different fields also differ. A good analysis of the audience also allows brands to get an idea about:
- Which social media sites to use
- Scheduling the post to go “live”
- Kind of content shared to increase the engagement of the brand
- Identity which products your target audience likes and how much, such as Oreo:
View this post on Instagram
4. Creating quality content
Creating valuable content that people may need always increases engagement rates on social media. In these contents, not only brands and products should be highlighted, but sincere communication should be established with the audience.
Valuable social media content may be educational, entertaining, inspiring, or promotional. For example, educational content arouses readers’ curiosity and enables people to gain knowledge. As this educational content related to the brand is liked by the audience, engagement rates increase.
It is possible to boost engagement rates, especially with creative content. Some of these ideas are:
- Making competitions. Giveaways and contests play a huge role in boosting social media engagements.
- Asking questions to the audience. Asking audience questions or measuring their level of knowledge are the most natural ways to boost engagement.
- To enable the audience to ask questions with the ‘‘Ask me a question’’ section on social media platforms.
- Adding animated gifs
- Creating a poll
- Using stickers or filters for Instagram Stories
5. Being up to date
Follow current trends to stay up to date. The latest developments should be kept up with and comments should be made on new topics in a way that is related to the brand. In this way, it is possible to communicate with the audience instantly and the engagement rates may increase.
Figure 4: Social media post of LEGO in celebration of Pride Month.
6. Brand voice development
Create a unique and attractive tone of voice. This will help create a closer relationship between the brand and its audience. A brand should consider the following when creating a tone of voice:
- Keep the vocabulary simple and understandable
- Create a sincere and friendly tone
- Use GIFs and emojis to create a level of personality
- The spoken language should be similar to the way the audience speaks. Use jargon or slang that speaks with the targeted audience
The company must choose a tone that it will use for all its social media platforms. Likewise, for example, speaking style on Twitter is not the same as speaking on the LinkedIn platform. For this reason, brands need to know which social media platform and which audience they are addressing.
Social media interactions are an indication of the influence of a brand or marketer on people. In this content, you can use tools that keep your brands reputable such as Socialays. Socialays offers the service of analytical data of a brand’s image on Instagram. Socialays displays engagement metrics, reads comments on the brand’s account, and categorizes them. Categorizing comments as positive, negative, or neutral, prevents the appearance of malicious, spam, or advertisement-containing unwanted comments.
With Socialays supported by artificial intelligence, it prevents comments that will harm your brand image from being under your posts. By following these comments from the control panel, you can permanently delete them or make them visible again.
7. Keeping the conversation flowing
Brands should pay attention to both reactive and proactive engagements to keep the conversation and communication alive.
Reactive brands respond to direct messages and comments. This is a great way to boost social media engagements.
Brands that are proactive spark conversations with people who haven’t contacted them directly. This type of speech includes when people make a spelling mistake while talking about a brand, it can be an opportunity to start a conversation around it.
8. Having a fast response time
Customers don’t like to wait. Therefore, a business or marketer needs to respond quickly to incoming questions and messages. The higher the customer satisfaction, the higher the engagement on social media. Of course, these quick answers shouldn’t be sloppy. The language used should also be appropriate and friendly.
9. Posting at the right time
It is necessary to know algorithms on social media platforms. For example, while the highest engagement rate is reached within the first hour on LinkedIn, such a clear interpretation cannot be made for Instagram.
Moments of high engagement are due to factors such as:
- Location
- Time zone
- Audience type of the social media platform
- The active period
Depending on the type of social media platform, the most appropriate time to post may vary.
Best time to post on Instagram
Instagram has become more popular, especially in recent years. Instagram offers many opportunities in the field of influencer marketing with its various video features. Top engagement rates can be achieved on Instagram, particularly posts published from Monday to Friday and from 10 am to 11 am.
Best time to post on Twitter
The peak time of engagement on Twitter is Monday to Thursday and from 8 am to 11 am. Generally, the early hours of the day are suitable for posting on Twitter. People prefer to spend time on Twitter to follow the news and read various articles. Later in the day, there is a decrease in Twitter engagement as many people are busy with their work.
Best time to post on TikTok
TikTok is a social media channel that has started to spread rapidly, especially among young people, and has various features. TikTok has very high engagement rates compared to other social media platforms.
The best time to post on TikTok is every day from 6 am- 10 am. Also, since many people rest at home on the weekends, it ensures that the posts receive high engagement. From 10 pm to 11 pm is the peak time of engagements on TikTok for posting.
10. Monitoring the social media engagement rates
After applying all the tips to boost social media engagements, all that remains is to analyze the data. Various analysis tools can be used to examine the engagements in detail and to obtain data. Carefully monitor the following:
- content creation
- analytics
- scheduling of posts
To sum up, one of the biggest things that matter for the growth of a social media account is engagement. Social media platforms, which are quite prominent in the business field, can reach a very large audience with an appropriate strategy. Factors such as constantly posting, dealing with customers in a friendly way, and choosing appropriate platforms are effective in increasing engagement. Considering all this, the power of social media and engagements will certainly continue to exist in the future.
