An Expert’s Guide to Increasing Your Social Media Engagement
Chances are that you have looked at someone’s social media post, probably from your favorite Instagram or Twitter account, and wondered how exactly that post got so many people’s attention. They are always filled with discussions, interactions, and more importantly, a ton of followers and shares.
So, you think to yourself, ‘how?’ How exactly are they doing it? How are they getting so much social media engagement?
The truth, however, might not be surprising, but it is nonetheless simple in its own way.
There is no secret to success when it comes to increasing your social media engagement. It is a result of hard work, research, and doing the right things at the right time. Used to be that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) would get you all that you needed, but these days, relying solely on SEO is never a good strategy. These days, you need a specific social media strategy, and a team to help you execute it.
In this blog, we will go through a few of them, and like it was said before, it might just be simpler than you think.
What is Social Media Engagement?
Let us start with the simplest of questions, which will be to ask the ‘what’ of it all. We all already know what social media is, otherwise we would not be looking into terms like ‘SEO’ or ‘SMM,’ (which is social media management, by the way).
Social media engagement, though, is simply all your interaction with other people, posts, comments, and the like. Tagging someone, tweeting, liking a picture of Instagram, sharing a Reddit post, or even doing just about anything on Tumblr (which is now obsolete). In other words, any interaction for a user with another, whether it is a friend or a brand, is social media engagement, and if you are a brand, you want people to interact with you on social media as much as possible.
What Makes Social Media Engagement Important?
Social media engagement can be tracked, so if you are a brand looking to see how you are doing on that front, there are a few metrics you need to keep an eye on.
- The number of Likes/Upvotes/Dislikes your posts get
- The number of Shares you have on your posts
- The number of followers your brand has
- The number of comments users leave on your posts
- The number of platform-specific actions, such as Retweets or sharing in other subreddits via Reddit
- Click-through rate
- Many more!
Why do these even matter, you might say? Well, for just about anyone else, social media engagement is for popularity, but for a brand, it is full of opportunity. The success of a social media campaign can depend on how much engagement it develops rather than how many people interact with your brand directly through sales or website visits. Remember, engagement is about all the metrics combined, not about one metric in general. Sometimes, even bad press can bring more engagement, so some analysis is required!
For example, the video game company Electronic Arts set a world record of the most downvoted Reddit comment ever, with more than 650,000 dislikes. It even got a Guinness World Record for just that! There was plenty of engagement on that social media post, but it was not all good.
The ultimate goal here is to create and nurture a long-term relationship with your target audience. With social media, you are not looking to do something now, but rather, bring in people and awareness so you might do much more later.
How Can You Create (Positive) Social Media Engagement?
Now that the goal for the type of social media engagement is set, it is time to focus on how to create it.
You can:
- Share content that gets people talking
- Allow users to create and share content
- Be mindful of seasons and timely content
- Maintain a communication with your audience
- Create and manage a community that reflects your brand
- Identify a purpose for your social media content
- Have an answer to ‘Why should people engage with you?’
- Understand your audience
- Offer your audience content they would like
- Understand that no great brands are passive
- Take both a short, and long-form approach
- Be consistent in creating social media content
- Create community events, such as competitions
- Foster transparency and be forthcoming with issues
- Don’t ignore the power of analytics and metrics
- Humor is not optional. It is necessary
- Always be open to feedback and constructive criticism
- Have fun with it
- Don’t be afraid to be educational
- Have community managers and ambassadors to be the ‘face’ of the brand
Of course, we cannot cover every single thing in great depth or detail here, but we can try to do some of it, or at least make a concise amalgamation of them into a few valuable lessons for higher social media engagement.
- Create Engaging Content
If you make content worth interacting with, people will interact with it. It is a simple idea to execute, though it does require many other simple things being done right as well. Those will come later, so let’s just focus on this one.
Think of engaging content as a conversation. If nobody that sees what you post has any reason to talk or mention it, they won’t. It is that simple. It is the same if you just say ‘Hello’ or ‘Hi’ to people without actually engaging them in a conversation with you.
For that, you need to create content that brings value to your audience, and to address their concerns should they have it. It gets them talking, gets them engaged, and that brings social media engagement. To make it positive, you have to tailor that content accordingly, too.
- Give Users the Ability to Make their Own Content
User autonomy is something that can make any social media platform a thriving hub for interaction and engagement. Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and Instagram; none of them create content except for a few posts that are meant to deliver certain messages, updates, or guidelines. The rest is all user-generated, and all these sites have their own ways to make it happen, as well as rules and community guidelines to ensure that users interact with each other with respect.
Your brand can do the same. Not the same, as in, create your own social media platform, but rather, give your users some autonomy and allow some User-generated Content (UGC) into your brand’s social media interaction. These can be reviews, interactions to reviews, customer advocacy, and social proof of your brand’s value.
- Make Use of Topical Subjects, Current Events, and Holidays
Being in the now is very important in social media engagement. A post shared too late can mean that users have now moved on, and you did not make use of a trending topic. Most social media platforms show a ‘trending’ tab to allow users to see what is popular, and it can be used to capture user attention for brands.
This type of timely content is not necessarily one that brings up a conversation, such as a holiday event.
People simply like to celebrate a Christmas event and wish everyone a Happy New Year later on. There does not need to be any reactionary content needed there, so curating your content according to the timely event is necessary.
A good practice is to focus on holiday events rather than on world events that might occur, as it allows your social media content to be more ‘neutral’ without taking a stance.
- Allow Your Brand to Feel ‘Normal’
Most people look at brands like corporations rather than a brand run by people. In fact, a lot of people might have had negative interactions with a brand’s customer service after a product or service defect.
However, proper social media engagement also gives users a platform to be heard, as the brand can listen and respond to them. It allows those negative experiences to be handled better, and for those users to continue to be better customers.
Sometimes, even setting up automated responses can be better than nothing, so do focus on both customer and user engagement through your brand’s social media. Try to make it so that there are community managers handling users and engaging with them instead of automated responses.
- Do not Underestimate the Value of Statistics
Metrics and social media analytical tools are invaluable for your brand. If you have more likes, but very few proportional comments, it indicates your social media posts are not creating engagements. If there are far more comments than likes, it shows that users are interacting with each other rather than your brand.
These are all just surface-level insights, but all these metrics, including the likes, dislikes, and shares that your social media posts get can be critical to understanding and curating for your audience.
FAQs
You got the questions, we have the answers. Here in this section, we will answer almost the most exciting ideas where we can learn about the questions and discuss the crucial points of SEO and its strategies.
- Why is it important to have a provoking social media management?
Whenever a client or visitor comes to the stage where they are deciding to either work with your company or not, they definitely visit the social media platforms to see their appearance, and how active they’re overall. Checking the reviews of people along with social posting frequencies, these things matter a lot because people actually look out for such things before they finalize with their decision of working together and investing their money.
If a company succeeds in getting an amazing social appearance, where they’re connecting with the audience, and people are engaging on the post; then the deal is quite close to being completed! Visitors and your potential audience will be attracted due to this.
- Is it necessary to maintain a well-explained, and creative social media medium?
Definitely yes! Social media strategist and experts who’re known for their well-explained and elaborated techniques along with strategies are seen making social media posts from brainstorming to designing and then finalizing the caption with something compelling. As we discussed, and answered before, it’s important to have a well-maintained social media platform because half of your audience is driven from there, and if your platforms ain’t good enough, they will no longer think of investing time, and even proceeding to the deal closure.
- Do you need a social media manager to manage the platforms?
Suppose, who’s running a boat and there are different people with experience but everyone considers themselves to be the best; who will drive it to the destination? An expert is required to drive the entire strategies and make everything happen where they can meet their vision, and come up with a concise conclusion. Similarly,a social media manager is responsible for researching, designing, and getting the post done from all ends which captivates the audience to the maximum and makes them convinced to purchase the services.
- How do hashtags play a vital role in making social media posts more trendy?
Social media posts are known for two reasons, how creative they are along with the content copy which gives the readers an insight into the post. A proper research is required before adding any hashtags in the post because your target audience can search your services with any hashtag on the social platforms and if you have used them in your hashtags then there is a certainty your post will pop up on the screen.
Conclusion | Expert Guide To Get Started With Social Media Management
These are just five of the possible ways you can increase your social media engagement, and all five are general strategies you can apply. None of them are hacks or secrets to make you successful, as they all require plenty of work to create social media engagement.
So, no, SEO alone will not do it. You have to make content that your audience talks about, can be educated from, and what they want to see. Do all that is listed here and more, and you will (eventually) see your social media engagement rise.
Don’t forget to add your precious comments and let us know how much you liked our blog, so we can come up with some similar ideas in the coming weeks. Feel free to share in the comment section, and add value to our write-ups.
