Social media can be a powerful tool that a business or organization can use to reach its audience. To ensure a business is using social media as effectively as possible, marketers track what is known as social media engagement. In this article, we discuss what social media marketing is, why it's important and how to improve social media engagement.
What is social media engagement?
Social media engagement is the measurement of shares, likes and comments on a social media post. It's a common metric for determining the effectiveness of a social media marketing campaign. Social media managers study engagement metrics to determine if their audience is paying attention to their content.
Why is social media engagement important?
Social media engagement is important because it provides information about the content quality and viewer response. Having high engagement on social media means a greater percentage of your audience is interacting with your brand, responding to your posts or visiting your website. By making social media engagement a priority, businesses can receive benefits such as:
Improved brand awareness
When users engage with your brand on social media, this behavior is often visible to their connections. Therefore, when someone engages with your content, those actions can result in new users paying attention to your social media pages who are not already familiar with your brand. By increasing brand awareness, it becomes more likely that someone remembers your business the next time they need something you offer.
Better return customer rates
Certain actions that improve social media engagement also improve customer satisfaction. For example, if you can answer questions or help a customer with an issue through social media, it is likely to improve their satisfaction with your product or services. Higher customer satisfaction rates are one of the biggest contributors to generating return customers.
Increased customer base
Using customer engagement strategies, such as creating content targeted to your audience, can influence users to become new customers after noticing your social media pages. For example, a local hardware store may share a blog post about starting a home improvement project. Someone from the same area may read the article and choose to shop at this local hardware store instead of going to a larger chain store.
1. Define your goals
Before implementing any new strategies, define what your goals are when working toward improving social media engagement. For example, you may want to increase your social media following or drive more traffic to your website. Create as many goals as you want while keeping them as specific as you can. This can help you later on when deciding the type of content to produce or which social media channels to prioritize.
2. Use social media more frequently
Try to use your social media accounts at least a few times per day. How often you're able to use your social accounts likely depends on the size of your social media team, how many accounts you have and the number of followers for each account. However, posting updates to your accounts and interacting with your followers more frequently may result in a higher social media engagement rate.
3. Focus efforts on select social media platforms
Rather than dividing your time among every social media platform, focus your attention on which ones your target audience interacts with the most. For example, you may start with only one platform and use most of your time and resources to engage those followers. As you improve engagement on one platform, expand into others. You can have accounts across all major social media platforms, but you'll likely see more consistent results if you focus more time on a select few rather than a little time on all of them.
4. Improve your content
To improve social media engagement, consider customizing your content to better appeal to your audience. Share information that your audience may find useful or entertaining. If you're unsure of the type of content your audience would like, consider using your social media platforms to ask them directly via surveys or the comment section on your posts. Many social media platforms allow you to create a poll, which can both engage your audience and provide you with feedback on the type of content your audience wants.
Whenever you share content on your social media channels, encourage your followers directly to engage with it. Ask them to share it with others, leave comments or like the post.
5. Engage with your followers
To get your audience to engage with you more, try engaging with them first. Respond to their comments in a timely manner to get their attention. For example, if someone mentions using one of your products in a post, take the time to leave a comment to thank them.
6. Incorporate a personal touch
Try adding personalized elements to your social media channels, such as using a follower's name in interactions or having the social media manager sign comments with their own name. Using names helps the interaction feel more personable and can encourage your followers to start further interactions.
7. Hold contests
Contests on social media are a great way to increase engagement because you can make the engagement a requirement for entry into the contest. For example, your business could hold a contest to give away a free product. To enter the contest, ask users to leave a comment on your social media post and share it with their followers. This not only engages your audience but also spreads brand awareness.
8. Study others in your niche
For more ideas on how to engage your audience, study popular accounts within your niche. See what kind of language they use to interact with their audience and the type of content they produce. Since you share a similar audience, adopting some of their strategies may help you increase your customer engagement rates.
9. Track engagement metrics
Consider having a system in place that tracks your social media engagement metrics for you. Most social media platforms have internal tools you can use, but you may wish to use third-party software that tracks them all in one location. Either way, in order to understand if your social media engagement strategies are working, analyze your engagement rates both before and after the implementation.
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