In an age when digital presence is king, building a dynamic and strong social media presence for one’s business is a fundamental requirement. High engagement with content on social media indicates that the business is:
- connecting meaningfully with current and future customers;
- making a desired impact on the market and creating its niche;
- able to build credibility and trust.
These are important to bring the business a sense of legitimacy. This helps drive up the sales of the company. The key to getting a boost in social media engagement is to keep the business up-to-date always, and Socials Up is an excellent companion to take into account.
What Qualifies as a Desirable Engagement on Social Media?
Simply put, social media engagement is a measure of one’s successful presence on social media websites. Although an essential part of the package, it is not enough to only generate a large fan-base or followers. It is also necessary to keep this audience engaged and to keep it growing organically. Besides, to build the right brand image, a business should retain the existing audience’s interest while attempting to attract potential new followers.
It is crucial to remember that any interaction with one’s social profile is tracked as a kind of engagement. Getting comments, shares, likes, and reposts are hence one way of ensuring social media engagement. Finding mention in posts of other users is another way. Click-through, tags, hashtags are all means to raise attention on social media. However, for successful and relevant social engagement, one has to identify and reach the right audience.
How Can One Increase Social Media Engagement with the Right Audience?
- To boost social media activities with the right audience, one has first to devise marketing strategies that lead to gain visibility.
- The biggest mistake one can make to treat digital marketing strategies separately from social media engagement strategies.
- The latter should ideally be an integral part of the former’s planning and execution, even if one chooses to give it a more relaxed and informal persona.
Uploading regular, relevant, and quality social media content can ensure that the right audience is getting driven to one’s profile. This exercise, no doubt, involves much pre-planning. Its execution can be quite time-consuming, especially when a business is just starting out. Looking into time-saving strategies is hence crucial.
Tips on How to Increase Social Media Engagement
#1 Use Social Media Analytics to Your Advantage
To expand presence and build trust, a business must first review the existing organic audience engagement dataset. Keep track of what posts are getting more likes, comments, and shares. Most social media sites provide their analytics tools for ready use.Facebook, for instance, allows for the tracking of the following metrics for a post:
- How many saw the post.
- How many interacted with it by viewing, commenting, and sharing.
- How man hid the post.
- If the post was reported for inappropriate content or spam.
- Which demographics had greater visibility of the post.
- If the post led viewers to view other content.
- How the post performs over time.
Such tracking is important for making major decisions regarding one’s social media presence. The data obtained can save valuable time in figuring out what works to generate real audience engagement and what does not.
#2 Schedule Regular Content Publishing
It is not enough to create informative and engaging content. A business has to put content out for its followers on a regular basis to keep the engagement alive. The crucial question here is determining how frequently content should get posted and how. The tone and voice of content should always be created, keeping the intended audience in mind. So should the frequency of post updates.
Depending on the nature and size of one’s business and its outreach, the content may be put up daily or weekly. For most businesses, posting one to three times a day turns out to be the ideal number to keep their social stream active and organic. Depending on the analytics reports of the time span during which content is most likely to get viewed or shared, a business should select the timing for posting new content onsite.
- Doing this manually may be too tedious and stressful.
- It is smarter to line up content and schedule a publishing sequence and time for the same.
- The use of scheduling tools to block time for creating and publishing content comes in handy here.
When a business has a presence on more than one social media website, it is a good idea to update all the profiles at the same time. Most businesses are able to maintain an impressive presence on multiple social media websites by simply scheduling simultaneous publishing of content across the sites.
#3 Employ Available Social Media Engagement Tools
The best content puts information out for the target audience and strives to make a human connection to encourage audience interaction and engagement.
- Use available tools to save preferences for photos and video edits and to make the content more appealing to the intended audience.
- Tailor the content to ask questions to the followers. These encourage them to particulate in polls, contests and share the content with their social media communities.
- Create and schedule such polls and contests in advance for boosting social media engagement.
Again, what tools may be available are specific to the social sites used to build a business presence. For instance, if Instagram is the preferred site for boosting content engagement, following the hashtag activity around one’s content is crucial to determine how the post is being received and what demographics. It is prudent to save lists of must-have hashtags to reduce the time required in typing them out each time a new post is uploaded.
#4 Tap into Employee Advocacy
Although it may look reasonably simple, managing a business profile for social media engagement is a fairly exhausting task.
- To effectively monitor it as constantly as possible, tap into the potential of employee advocacy.
- Get your employees and business partners to share, like, and generate conversations around the business content on their profiles.
- Employee advocacy can not only drive engagement towards the business; it also exponentially expands the reach of the content by bringing it to the notice of new audiences in the employees’ social media circles.
- It brings traction and ultimately leads to an increase in sales as having employees circulate content in a positive light can give the content and thereby the business a boost in its credibility.
If the business is a one-man show, it helps to get family and friends to take this task up on a regular basis to enable the business to grow and sustain its online presence. The ultimate goal of boosting social media engagement is to build a brand that also profitably manages to sell its wares. Hence, the business feed must getreal clicks and organic shares that will bring desired channels of advertisement and potential customers to the business. Delegating this means of content distribution to others frees up valuable time. Any time saved on social media can be spent on other strategies for driving up sales.
#5 Make Content More Variable and Interesting for Others
It is no secret that generating new content from scratch without compromising on quality or information is a task that requires considerable time. Time needs to be invested in research, drafting, editing and finalizing other more delicate aspects of any content before actually publishing it. However, social media engagement requires a faster turnover of content on social websites to keep the audience from losing interest in the business. For this, re-purposing already created content can be a quick and effective means of boosting engagement with the audience. An image from an earlier post can serve as a backdrop for fresh content, or a blog post can be retweeted with a new headline. Throwback posts give the business opportunity to bring back previously published matter to the audience as is. One could summarize old posts, build memory books of old photos, or turn the format of the content in an article into a new one to save time without compromising on the quality of the content.
Aside from repackaging old content in a new form, it can also be used as a take-off point to create a completely new post too. All it needs is a little creative brainstorming. For instance, if some post has already been made on how to dress up for a cocktail event, then the next one is recommended to be soon written about what types of closes to avoid on a cocktail event. Besides saving time, such posts can also be linked back to the original post to create traction for the earlier post and boost its audience engagement too. This can attract new visitors, but it can also open up dormant conversations around a publication, thus increasing search engine ranking for the older content.