9 Steps to Increase Social Media Engagement

You are probably aware of the power of social media, 2.3 billion active social media users and it is still growing. That is a growing pool of customers that want to engage and interact with you are your brand. You might be a charity based in the USA, or a cafe based in Glasgow or even a marketing agency based in Newport [like us!]. As a marketing agency, we often get asked by clients how do you get the best out of social media? Just being on social media isn’t enough, you need to find ways to engage with your potential customers and find ways of increasing social media engagement.

Below I have laid out,

9 Steps to Increase Social Media Engagement…

1. Know why your audience is on social media

Do you know why your audience is using a specific social media platform? Perhaps your audience uses Facebook to check out news stories, if that is the case then post more newsworthy content. Or maybe your audience loves using Instagram to look at their friend’s photos, posting behind the scene photos of your staff and business will increase the chances of catching their eye.

Knowing why your target audience is on social media means you’ll post content that they want to see and make them more likely to engage with your posts.

2. Be entertaining

When on social media your customers want to be entertained, not sold to. When brands forget this they lose the attention of their customers. Humour is one way that brands can promote themselves on social media and keep the audience engaged. The Dollar Shave Club showed this when their advert went viral, sharing the brand message while at the same time entertaining the audience. People liked it, shared it and started tagging their friends to watch it. Which led to millions of likes, shares, and comments and was viewed over 22 million times.

3. Ask for a specific reaction

Back in February Facebook introduced Facebook reactions which gave us more options of how to reply to posts. You no longer have to “Like” sad statuses, you can react in a more appropriate way.

Asking for your audience to engage with your content through a certain reaction or in the comments can be an incredibly effective way of increasing engagement. This could be as simple as asking your audience to “Love” a photo or what their thoughts are on a new product you are releasing.

4. Give something away

Likes, shares, and comments are great but clicks through to your website are vital for getting traffic to your website. Share facts or information on social media with a link back to your website, offer up a teaser and then encourage the audience to engage and visit your website.

People love to get things for free, get your audience interested by offering them something for free and then getting them to your website or collecting their email address for an email campaign.

5. Host social media contests

Social media contests are quick and easy ways to grow your audience and engagement rates. Qwertee a t-shirt company launched a campaign to grow their Facebook page to 100,000 likes by giving away 1,000 t-shirts a week. All that you had to do was like the page and submit your email. Free giveaways motivate people, and it is one of the most effective ways to gain more likes, follows or email addresses. It really helps you with increasing social media engagement.

35% of Facebook fans like a page so that they can participate in contests.

6. Ask followers to engage

The average time somebody spends on a website is only 20 seconds, so you have to make those 20 seconds count.

Asking people to engage will work, ask your followers to share, like or tell you their opinion, your followers want to tell you what they think. Focus on a single call to action to avoid confusing your followers; tweets will have an increased chances of being retweeted by 12 times if you ask for it and 23 times higher if you actually say “retweet”.

7. Share others content

Engagement goes both ways! If you want people to engage with you, you need to engage with others. By engaging with the content of your followers, including other businesses, you will increase the likelihood of them in engaging with you, increasing social media engagement.

8. Use images

Sharing images on Twitter increases retweets by 150%. This isn’t just on Twitter, images are much more likely to be liked and shared than text-based content. This is down to the fact it doesn’t take as long to look at an image as it does to read a block of text. When sharing a post with an image include snippets of info on what it is about. This helps the message stand out and helps you in increasing social media engagement

9. Have a plan and stick to it

Social media calendars help you to plan and post consistently and in a timely manner. If you don’t post on a consistent basis you followers may stop paying attention to you. Google takes into account the “Freshness Score” of your website when ranking it. So the fresher the content on your website the better your ranking on Google.

Here at Pledge we are a marketing agency based in Newport and we love being social and engaging with people. If you want to chat about ways to increase social media engagement then get in touch.

If you have found any other ways to increase social media engagement then comment below and let us know.