How to Increase Social Media Engagement in 2023
Social media platforms are not what they used to be before. Formerly used for purely interacting with friends or getting to know new people, these platforms have now transformed into a place where brands and organizations come forward to market their activities, post relatable content that resonates with the audience, and convert their followers into potential customers.
Why is it Important for Your Brand to Have a Social Media Presence?
Gone are the days, when having big hoardings, posters, and pamphlets were the only way of telling people about your business and its activities. With the growth seen in the potential of social media platforms, what the business can earn as benefits go far beyond their imagination. So, should your brand have an active social media presence? Let us look at some benefits to understand:
- Social media attract customers and engage in conversation to build a loyal customer force
- It can help in increasing revenue
- Reach new customers by gaining a greater visibility
- Useful to keep an eye on competitors and their activities
- Helps to increase traffic to your websites, thereby also improving the search engine rankings
145 minutes per day. This is the average time a person spends on social media considered on a worldwide basis, giving marketers all around the globe the golden opportunity to grow effectively by using these very social media platforms.
A lot of businesses might wonder that we have social media accounts where our customer base resides, we also post content that is useful to the target audience, we have healthy interactions with them too, but is there a way to actually measure the growth of your brand through social media? And how does social media engagement come into play in all of this?
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Let us try and understand what social media engagement is, how to employ a strategy to understand the growth of your business, and why is this phenomenon becoming important by the day?
What is Social Media Engagement?
Earlier, when businesses wanted to communicate with their audience, they used to invest in audio, tv, or print media channels. These media channels definitely reached the mass audience but only offered a one-way system of communication. Customers viewed the messages and visited these stores to look around and/or make a purchase.
Social media has significantly changed this system of communication. Now social media platforms provide a two-way system of communication, where people can actively connect and engage in meaningful conversations with the brands.
It refers to how people are interacting with the content that you produce and post on various social media accounts. This is a broad term and can include a variety of actions including but not limited to; likes, comments, replies, mentions, clicks, etc.
Measuring your engagement on social media will make you understand whether the content that you are producing is what the audience is looking for or not. When a brand possesses a strong engagement, it shows that your audience is resonating with you and is also making a purchase and continuing so willingly.
Brands must be where their current and potential customers are and with millions of people now at the disposal of brands, all thanks to social media, it is thus becoming important to understand if your brand is capturing enough attention and what steps should further be taken to step-up such interactions.
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Why is Social Media Engagement so Important?
Organic engagement on social media is declining. With the user feeds now filled with advertised and boosted posts and social media platforms looking to monetize from such avenues, having an active presence and genuinely building and engaging with your audience are the true ways to build yourself as a successful and known brand.
1. Engagement Helps in Building Trust and Loyalty
Brands actively post valuable content on social media about their products or services, but when such posts garner a sizable number of likes, comments, and/or reshares, the prospective customers find the brand to be trustable. As human beings, we will more likely place our trust in a brand online that has an active feed of posts and a greater number of likes.
You are less likely as a consumer to invest your time and money on a brand that has just 5-7 posts with likes and comments in single-digit numbers. This reiterates how important engagement is for brands and companies to achieve an active audience base.
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2. It Makes the Audience Understand Your Human Side
Social media is about people, and people would like to communicate with people. With a good engagement on your posts, the audience perceives you as a real person, and by showing this human side, they place a level of trust in you and your brand that makes them want to engage with you and ultimately remembers you. A good engagement will be perceived as reviews by prospective customers, making them more likely to spend time looking through what you offer as a brand.
3. Expands Your Marketing Reach
Social media platforms have a global reach, they aren’t limited to local borders. This provides the businesses with a greater audience base to interact with and convert into sales.
For example, if the clothing brand H&M wants to tell people about its new product, it can post about it on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter and the news would reach thousands of its followers in a matter of seconds.
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4. Engagement is also an Important Metric in Social Media Algorithms
A wider engagement will offer better chances of visibility on social media platforms. Different social platforms have varying algorithms and as a brand, it becomes important to have a general overview of them. While Instagram focuses on “what posts and accounts you engage with, the timeline of posts, how often you use Instagram, how many people you follow”, Facebook focuses on posts “that spark conversations and meaningful interactions” at the top of people’s news feeds.
5. Increased Engagement Increases Brand Engagement
When people do not just follow or like your posts, but actively comment, share, and interact with your content along with liking and following, it increases the brand’s chance at coming on people’s feed.
When a newer audience sees such posts, it increases the brand’s awareness. Also, as the content is well engaged with, it fosters a trust factor among the newer audience thus inclining them to follow the brand.
Also, know about Social Media Promotion for Marketers
How To Increase Social Media Engagement?
The one hard truth about finding the perfect engagement strategy is that there is no magic wand that can give you the perfect answers in one swift swing! But saying that, certain parameters can be considered for giving a boost to your social media engagement game.
1. Analyze Your Engagements on Previous Posts
First of all, organizations need to know the kind of engagements they received on their previous posts. For understanding that, note down what is your current follower strength, what is the number of likes, comments, shares, and direct messages or queries.
Next, you would want to notice any dips or sudden increases in your engagement over the next posts. This will give you an idea of what kinds of posts people are looking out for and what doesn’t work well with your audience.
Brands can effectively employ certain social media analytics tools to understand their engagement better.
2. Understand Who is Your Audience:
If your brand is not matching the desired engagement level chances are that your posts or activities are not reaching the correct audience. Brands should be aware of the kind of audience that they are wishing to target with their activities on social media channels.
Once they are aware of their target audience, they will possess a larger clarity about what social media sites to use, what to post to resonate well, what time to post content and what kind of tone should the content use.
For example, an online toy shop will look out to target caretakers or new mothers and would use a different tone in their content from luxury car manufacturers whose main aim will be to target the upper class while their content tone would carry with them a touch of superiority.
Understanding your audience base means content gets a greater chance of receiving the desired engagement while also increasing the prospects of converting followers into potential clients.
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3. Create Content that the Audience Finds Useful
Social media isn’t just a place for advertising your newest offerings or promoting new discounts or sales. Such platforms exist so that the brands can come to the level of the audience and provide regular content that helps them or makes them feel involved.
For example, Cadbury, the brand famous for its chocolates, doesn’t only post about its new chocolates but also shares with its audience ways to incorporate its chocolates into new delicious desserts.
Such kind of content will resonate well with the audience that will help them to increase their engagement via the social media platforms while also helping them grow their business prospects.
4. Be Fast in Giving Responses to the Queries and/or Comment
One of the many benefits of social media is that customers can bring attention to the various things directly by communicating them to your brand on your social media channels.
If your brand puts in place a system for quicker reply deliveries, it would lead to greater customer satisfaction, where the customers will feel they are being heard, so brands should try and respond to every comment or message they receive.
5. Be a Part of the Ongoing Conversation among the Public
One way of increasing social media engagement that brands must follow is being part of ongoing conversations, it could mean talking about things that are trending in the public or replying to conversations among the audience that might mention you.
For example, with Facebook changing its name to “Meta”, various brands were seen on social media who tried their hand at incorporating this news in their unique special way. Zomato tweeted, “pitched renaming our brand to Zometa, but the idea was rejected at once”.
This reinforces relatability among the audience, making brands feel more reachable. Also, it provides a great way to spark conversations to get more people talking.
Run Giveaways and Contests
Giveaways and contests are great ways to boost engagement on social media platforms. The participants of these contests would be asked to engage with the content in many ways for example by sharing, commenting, liking the posts, etc.
Be Active and Post Consistently
While it is not necessary for brands to post content daily, it does become important to produce some meaningful content for your audience at regular intervals and at a consistent pace. While targeting good engagements, the last thing that your brand would want is to be forgotten by the audience.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. What are some examples of social media engagement?
Social media engagement is a broad term encompassing likes, shares, comments, etc. Some of the methods of engagement include: responding to mentions, producing user-friendly content, organizing giveaways, giving a call to action to your audience, etc. A few examples are mentioned below:
- Profile visits
- Mentions, including both tagged and untagged
- Replies
- Retweets
- Regram
- Direct messages, email, text
- Likes, comments, saves
- Shares, link clicks
Q2. What are some social media engagement tactics?
Some of the engagements tactics on social media include:
- Posting frequently
- Conducting polls and Ask Me Anything rounds
- Participating in Twitter chats
- Run giveaways and contests
Q3. What are some ways to increase engagements?
While a different set of methods may work for different brands, some ways that can increase your brand’s engagement include:
- Give direct responses to your audience and customers by becoming part of conversations that involve your brand
- Make your posts visually attractive so as to catch the attention
- Use relevant hashtags. Brands can also create their own hashtags and then can ask customers to post using the same hashtag
- Post content when you know your target audience might be using social media
- Be a part of the latest trends and issues
- Use influencers to share your content
Q4. What is the social media engagement rate?
Engagement rate measures the interaction that the content receives relative to the reach. It includes more active reactions including, likes, comments, saves, shares, mentions, etc.
Knowing about your engagement rate is important as the follower count can sometimes be misleading. Your brand might have a huge following, but the number of people who can actually be interacting with it might be very less. Engagement rate metrics will show how strong is your brand’s relation to the audience.
Q5. What is considered a good engagement rate?
Usually, rates depend on the industry, audience size, and the type of content published, but most social media marketing experts agree that a rate between 1-5% is considered an optimal engagement rate.
Conclusion
Improving your engagements over social media can result in rapid growth for your business. But it’s important to find out what’s best for your brand in relation to your audience base.
As with any attribute, social media engagement may take a little time to reach your desired levels, but consistency is key. Be consistent in your posts, provide quality content to your followers, and interact with them. This is the plain base that can be incorporated into full-fledged social media strategies.
Also, it’s important that you set measurable goals and commit to them. Revisit your goals and see how far you have reached in achieving them. Bring in the necessary changes required if you don’t see the desired results.
The whole process might take some time to show results, but with proper tools and practices set in place, it’ll reap great benefits for your organization.
