Social media engagement is very important for any business that wanted to succeed on the social media platform. Social media has taken a position as the leader in marketing and branding since many businesses and critical people use it as a vital catalyst for their growth. If done correctly, the domino effect of social media can create positive waves for a business or individual and boost their brand awareness. These positive waves can increase company profits.
In the current world, promoting one’s brand through social media is vital since many people are on one social media platform or another. However, content on social media platforms alone does not improve sales. To successfully use social media for business advancement and brand awareness, one should pay keen attention to social media engagement.
Strong social media engagement signifies that you are making an impact with your online presence. It is not about looking popular. It is more about making connections with clients, both current and potential, which serve to boost the business brand both online and offline.
What is Social Media Engagement?
Social media engagement is defined as the measurement of the way social media users interact with your social media accounts and the content you share. Even as you gain a following in your social media accounts, the most tremendous success is how engaged your audience is. Therefore, social media engagement can be measured through different metrics for every social media platform. Each platform has unique metrics. The most used social media platforms and the famous metrics used to measure social media engagement are:
- Twitter – retweets, replies, likes
- Instagram – likes, links, clicks, comments, views
- LinkedIn – comments, link clicks, shares
- Facebook – shares, reactions on posts, comments, and impressions.
Social media engagement is more about quality than quantity. A business sharing content that engages its audience is more likely to make better sales than one with a more significant following but little engagement. Engagement measures whether the content you create and share resonates with your followers. It allows the construction of long-term relationships with your target audience.
Popular Strategies Used To Develop Engagement
1. Proactive interacting
Proactive interaction is done by promptly responding to comments or questions that followers make under your posts. Additionally, you can initiate further communication to assist them. Proactive interaction is beneficial if your responses are informative and your content brings users the content they require. You can achieve your goal of forming long-term relationships with your followers by actively taking part in conversations initiated under your posts and sharing meaningful information.
2. User-generated content
You can develop engagement by promoting your brand with the help of your target audience. To achieve this, you can find followers who are your brand’s enthusiasts and ask them to tag your social media account or place a hashtag on the posts they make that are related to your brand. User-generated content can increase engagement since people tend to believe other users more than they believe brands.
3. Regular communication
Ensure that you respond to your followers’ questions since ignoring them can damage your social media engagement potential. Purpose to attend to all questions and comments in good time. You can use Socialays to ensure that any comments, replies, or questions made on your posts are relayed to you for your action. Leaving questions unanswered can have devastating consequences on your brand’s reputation. Timing your posts when the most considerable portion of your audience is online can provide you with the opportunity to gain a high interaction with them.
Importance Of Social Media Engagement
There are several benefits a business or an individual aiming to grow their brand can get from social media engagement. Establishing a solid social media presence, building a considerable following, and effectively engaging them with quality content requires significant effort. However, the efforts made are sure won’t be in vain because social media engagement is a good investment in that;
1. Provides social proof for a business or individual.
The accumulated likes and comments on your business or brand social media platforms make a difference when it comes to how prospective clients perceive your business or brand. However, a client visiting your page and finding a large fan base can provide them with a sense of social proof similar to that of a celebrity endorsement or a customer testimonial. Seeing that so many people follow your business and speak highly of it can provide a prospective customer with a sense of security.
2. Cost-effective when compared to a traditional advertisement.
Traditional advertising involves the use of a lot of money to print flyers to reach just a small number of people. On the other hand, social media engagement done correctly can produce a lot of shares hence reaching a lot of viewers more than any flyer campaign ever could. Social media marketing campaigns are less expensive, and one retweet or share can get to hundreds of people at no cost at all. Proper social media engagement can ensure that your campaigns get too many people since thousands of people are always logged into one social media platform or another at any given point in time.
3. Social Media Engagement can boost brand awareness.
Every person interacting with your social media page increases the overall awareness of your brand. The awareness of your brand grows every time a customer or potential client likes or shares your posts since their friends and followers will see the engagement.
4. Help widens the market reach.
Social media platforms reach every corner of the globe, which means you can reach your followers, customers, and target audience from any point of the world. A large number of social media users also ensures that you reach a more significant number of people, thus widening your market reach.
5. Enhances trust in the brand.
An active presence on social media means that you consistently produce quality content, give your customers valuable information, and offer quality services. Consistent quality posts with valuable information can build the trust of those who visit your social media handles and turn them into potential customers. Building trust for your brand means that people will look for your brand whenever they need products or services relevant to what you offer. Many likes, shares, and comments on your posts will have newcomers trusting your posts and thus have them exploring them further.
6. Promotes search engine presence
Social media has a great impact when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). Social media and search performance correlate. The correlation means that google is more likely to signal and represent a traffic source to your channels if you get more likes and comments on your social media platforms.
7. Social Media Engagement allows for the valuable feedback
Actively engaging your followers in the comments and answering their questions can motivate them to give you valuable feedback that will help you improve your services. You can do this by following up on complaints and analyzing suggestions from your customers about your product or services.
8. Provides a human touch
Engaging your followers by interacting with them, answering their questions, and analyzing their feedback will warm them to your brand. Responding to them will have them realize that you are human just like them and not robotic hence having them enjoy their engagements with you. Giving your business or brand the human touch will have people more inclined to like your brand.
Create Engaging Social Content
A good social media engagement campaign starts with good content. Your followers are likely to like, comment, or share your posts when you have engaging content. Below are ways to create engaging social media content.
1. Mix up your content
The posts you make are in competition with your followers’ friends and other pages they follow. People are more likely to scroll past very wordy posts or posts without images. Therefore, when making a post, find a suitable image or photos that speak to your audience. Your following is likely to rise.
2. Share original photos
Using stock photos as the images, you attach to your posts may be reducing the engagement on your posts. Real and original photos are more likely to get more likes, comments, and shares. Using an original photo can be as simple as taking photos with a good smartphone. Make sure that the images you use for posting match the text attached to them.
3. Make use of graphics
Visual information tends to attract more audiences than written information. Therefore, you should make use of infographics. Charts and images in your content to attract more viewers. When using graphics, always remember to showcase your content’s main points and pull quotes from your content or reword them to make them easily sharable.
4. Share customer reviews and testimonials
As earlier mentioned, people tend to trust other people more than they trust brands. Most buyers make their purchase decisions after visiting review sites to learn about a product. Sharing your customer reviews and testimonials with catchy captions will faster sell your services and products to your prospective clients.
5. Make your content valuable
The content you share should be interesting and engaging to your audience. Valuable content can be
a) Educational: educational content can spark curiosity in readers and help them gain knowledge. The knowledge shared must be relevant to your brand.
b) Entertaining: entertaining content intrigues your audience. It doesn’t have to be necessarily funny, even though humor is a great way to keep your audience entertained.
c) Inspiring: inspiring content should either be positive or memorable. The content should have a positive emotional impact that drives your followers to take action or change their perspective on a particular issue.
d) Promotional: promotional content encourages your followers to take action. The content should be specific and straight to the point.
By having different types of content on your social media handles, your followers will always look forward to your posts since they learn something different and intriguing with each post you make.
Social Media Engagement Tactics To Grow Your Audience
Now that you know how to create engaging social content, we can look into the social media engagement tactics to grow your audience. A large audience means a bigger reach and better potential growth for your business and brand. A good engagement ensures more closed deals and more trusting customers, the tactics below will improve and increase your engagement with your social media followers.
1. Share the right content for the right platform
Every social media platform has unspoken rules about how posts are made. Curate your content and tailor them to each platform rather than copay pasting the same content on every platform you have a social media handle on. This will keep your audience interested in what you have to share.
2. Make your posts frequent and consistent
You are likely to get more engagement when you post frequently. Infrequent posting puts you at the risk of going unnoticed since so many others brands and people are already posting. Maintain your online presence by posting frequently and consistently so that people can engage with you on your posts. Posting every day may be tricky, but you can schedule how often you make your posts.
3. Post at the right time
Study your audience and make your posts when most are likely to be online. In that way, you can get a high engagement from your followers online at that time. Every business and brand attracts a different audience, and the right time for you may not be the right time for somebody else. Work with your target audience.
4. Join groups and forums relevant to your brand
Actively participating in conversations made in forums and groups relevant to your brand puts you in the spotlight. Other members in the forums or groups may follow you due to the insightful information you give in the conversations held in these groups. Others may side chat with you for guidance and, in the process, help you get prospective clients. Active participation in forums and groups showcases your knowledge and expertise in the area of discussion.
5. Have Q&A sessions
A great social media engagement creates a good buzz for a company hence keeping it in a customer’s mind when they need to make a purchase decision. Holding a question and answers session allows you to have a conversation with your audience. It also helps you identify your audience’s views about the products or services you offer. Actively engaging your audience also builds their trust in your business and brand.
6. Make your responses quick and thorough
Apart from knowing what a business offers, customers also follow business pages to get quick after-sales services. Therefore, you need to respond to queries quickly and in good time and provide the correct amount of information. Quick and thorough responses show customers that you respect their time and value them, thus making them long-term clients.
7. Share and comment on other peoples’ posts
Always promoting your brand shows you as selfish. For that reason, you should share content and comment on posts that relate to the products you offer or the services you provide. Sharing information about other pages shows that you know your stuff, and customers are more likely to trust you.
8. Link in other social media platforms on your posts
Providing links to your other social media platforms on your posts redirects your followers to all your other pages. Since your content is not copy-pasted, this variety of content will have your loyal followers engaging with you. It also makes it easy for people to engage.
9. Always make your content sharable
This is important in increasing engagement since every time your content is shared, the audience viewing it is increased. Therefore, never forget to make your posts sharable. Politely ask followers to engage by telling them to like, follow, or share your content. Give them a reason to engage by ensuring your content is good.
How To Measure The Impact Of Your Social Media Engagement
Social media engagement can be used to monitor how it impacts your business. Since checking on the Return on Investment is not a sure way to check on this impact, you can check the success of your social media engagement through;
a) Customer support impacts where you check how many messages you are responding to on social media, whether you are responding in good time and whether it reduces the number of requests you get through other channels such as email.
b) The brand impact is where you look at how the brand perceptions have been built over time in the different social media channels.
You need to monitor your social media engagement if you aim to improve it.
Conclusion
Social media engagement determines how your target audience interacts with your business or brand social media accounts. It creates two-way communication between you and your customers and potential clients, allowing for the improvement of products and services. Without engagement, social media becomes just media. Engagement makes it a place that can grow your business and affect your relationship with potential customers. It can help you improve your product and service provision as well as gain more customers.
