How to Increase Social Media Engagement: 6 Tips for Business Owners
8 minute read
Engagement levels on your social media pages sometimes tend to decrease. However, this should not be a reason to worry if you spot it and act on time.
The truth is that organic reach, in general, is in a decline. This applies to both Facebook and Instagram. Nowadays, brands know how important users’ attention is, but they rarely conduct proper research to devise a good strategy which would attract attention.
To make the matter even worse, some businesses fail to pay enough attention to their accounts after creating them. And this is what makes engagement plummet.
Your engagement rate reflects the quality of your content, higher rates indicating that the content is engaging and your audience is interacting with it. These interactions include likes, shares, comments, and so on.
Ultimately, the more people interact with your content, the higher your chances are to improve your brand awareness, conversions, and brand image.
But how can you improve your engagement on social media?
This guide will help you learn how to fix declining engagement rates.
Overview:
- Are you connecting with your audience?
- Take advantage of video content
- Stay consistent
- Engaging with your audience
- Introduce contest
- Brand storytelling
- Better social media engagement requires patience and a lot of effort
Are you connecting with your audience?
Knowing your audience is a prerequisite which comes before creating content and any other effort you make to win over customers’ attention.
Basically, your social media followers should be similar to your ideal buyer persona. This makes it easier to target the right people and increase conversions while promoting your brand. To better know who your followers are, check your analytics and use tools that will help you learn about your audience’s demographics (age, gender, etc.).
People want a varied experience and that means that you have to use the right content on different platforms.
More than 500 million accounts use Instagram and Facebook stories on a daily basis, which means that you shouldn’t ignore this trend. When it comes to Twitter, tweets with image links usually gain 200% more engagement compared to tweets with no image links.
The image below shows how Slack handles customer questions on social media.
Take advantage of video content
Video marketing has become so popular that around 81% of businesses now use it along with other marketing methods. In addition, social media posts with video content receive 48% more views compared to posts with no video content.
But what kind of video content can you make? After all, some videos you find online are quite boring. Fortunately, there is a wide range of video content ideas that you can make use of, such as:
- Product tutorials
- Question and answer sessions
- Behind the scenes content
- Live content
- Testimonials
- Employee/team introduction
- Case studies
- Company announcements
- Event recordings
- Workshops
- Training webinar
- Exclusive interviews with people in your industry
- Product or service introduction
This Instagram video demonstrates how a tutorial can look great with unique visuals.
Stay consistent
High-quality content will not get you too far if you are not consistent with it. That is why posting regularly on your social media pages is the only way to help your business grow its reach and improve its engagement.
This may seem a bit difficult, but consider reusing the content you have already posted on different pages and repurposing it to save time and be more efficient. For instance, you could use a blog post to transform it into a video, make a podcast out of a blog post, or even turn an infographic into an informative video.
Just take a look at your analytics to see what posts are performing the best. Then take those posts and repurpose them, making them even better with new graphics and visuals and then sharing them on your pages.
For instance, Hubspot used different types of content on their pages to promote their 2020 marketing report. Instagram, by nature, is a visual platform while Twitter focuses on curiosity to encourage users to check out the report.
Consider the content forms that you should post on different platforms. Hubspot kept the tweet short and meaningful with the aim to grab the attention quickly. Longer posts usually work better on other platforms, especially when you consider the character limit on Twitter.
Engaging with your audience
Active and constant engagement is the way to improve your social media engagement levels and that is why many marketers stimulate conversations. This usually happens when admins reply to user comments or create content that sparks discussions and debates.
Interactive content forms include:
- Templates
- Question and answer sessions
- Polls
- GIFs
- Stickers
- Branded hashtags
Buzzfeed and similar brands often use polls and quizzes on their Instagram stories to stimulate user engagement.
Introduce contest
Many companies have found success in sponsored giveaways. Everyone loves free stuff and that is why giveaways are successful. Just remember to run a contest that is on brand and that will make people keep your brand in their minds even when the contest is over.
On the other hand, you could also collaborate with influencers for contests. Influencers from your niche can have a significant impact on your brand awareness. This is especially true if those influencers have a loyal following in your business’s audience.
Take Passion Planner’s contest as an example.
Brand storytelling
Another great method that has worked for many companies’ customer engagement is storytelling. Brand storytelling is used as a method to share your business’s values and ideas. The story told by your brand reflects who you are and what your business wants to achieve.
When a company relies on brand storytelling on its social media pages, it makes its audience feel involved and active in their business. And when people feel like they impact decision making, engagement goes up. On top of that, it surely helps a business stand out.
For instance, Tide used brand storytelling to present their community work. It was a free laundry campaign for people in need. This struck a chord with social users on an emotional level and also showed people how Tide participates in charity initiatives.
Better social media engagement requires patience and a lot of effort
Even though you may be inspired by the tips from this article, keep in mind that you will not see instant results. Improving engagement takes time, but the rewards will be great.
Create a solid content marketing plan and remain consistent on all your pages. Reuse and repurpose great content pieces you already have to save both your time and money.
See how Metigy can improve your social media marketing.
What now?
Well it’s simple! If you have any questions about getting your business started, get them all answered by having a free consultation call with our experts.
