10 Tips For Increasing Your Social Media Engagement

The key to becoming a successful social media user is in the engagement.

Social media is beginning to take its rightful throne in the world of marketing as for many businesses it’s the key catalyst for brand growth. If done right, it’s domino-effect can create waves of positivity for many businesses to boost brand awareness and increase conversions to improve company profits.

Promoting your brand through social media is therefore vital to businesses, but getting your content on these channels isn’t what gets you the sales. The key to becoming a successful social media user is in the engagement. Follow these top tips for increasing social media engagement below to achieve business growth.

1. Talk About Your Topic (Not Just Your Brand)

In many new situations when you come into contact with new people it’s important to get talking to them. Obviously creating content and publishing it onto your social feeds is perfect in letting people know what you are about. But, if you don’t have a following, which many new users won’t have, joining groups and creating them will help to get your name about.

In conjunction with joining forums on your expertise, it’s great to create some of your own. Making multiple groups on your social media platforms and inviting key influencers and prospective customers to join in the discussion is one of the smartest ways of spreading your brand.

2. Join Question & Answer Sessions

Handing out nuggets of gold to customers is as easy as giving them useful information and answering their queries. Joining Q&A answer sessions is a great way to provide users with value and gets you seen as a helpful brand. If you can offer relevant answers to customer queries and spark discussion with your prospective customers, all before your competitors, you will become the go-to seller.

With consumers becoming more impatient and wanting answers to their queries almost immediately, having a dedicated customer response team is perfect for catering to those needs.

When researching into the most common FAQs in your field, it’s best practice to create in-depth guides or more detailed blog posts to give customers insightful data into their queries. Adding links to these in your responses shows you are willing to go above and beyond to help your customers. People like to buy from a brand they can trust, know will deliver and be on-hand when things don’t go to plan. Through delivering a hub of help in each of your responses, you are likely to attract more buyers and become a force to be reckoned with.

3. Share Other People’s Content

If someone else can provide better answers to a query, make use of their content. Your customers will see that you are there to give them what they need, whether it comes from yourself or not. If your social media feed can provide them with relevant information, whether it’s yours or not, they will be attracted to your brand and hence will be encouraged to follow you.

Keeping your content diverse (yet relevant) and from different contributors, will keep customers interested. Sometimes hearing the same person talk about the same stuff, day in day out can become a little boring. So get sharing!

Not only should you share content from different businesses in the industry, it’s important you share your followers and customers posts too. Particularly for those brands who are well established, getting your tweet about how you love Thorntons chocolate shared by Thornton’s themselves can be an exciting moment for that chocolate lover!

In addition to making the customer feel great about themselves for being worthy to go on your business feed, it can lead to them sharing your reply to them or even screenshotting the evidence of you favouriting or sharing their content.

That means more exposure for you. From simply clicking the share buttons of positive posts around your brand or goods and services, you can spark more customer engagement. Perfect.

#4: Make Your Customers Feel Engaged

Not only should you just share your customer’s posts, but to really make them feel engaged, it’s best to give direct responses to their content.

Responding to every customer post that doesn’t just directly address the brand but perhaps mentions it through a specific hashtag is great for ensuring each customer feels like they are valued by the business. Using social media tools to find every user who is posting about the brand is vital to ensure users feel like they are connected to the company or.

Creating a Conversation

Another great tool for getting engagement to not only occur but continue is to create a conversation with customers to get them talking to you. By asking questions about personal experiences the customer has with the goods and services, it can help the brand to obtain customer feedback as well as sparking discussion among users.

5. Make Your Posts Visual

Just like emoticons, images and videos are also great additions to add to social media posts and marketing content in general. These act to create a more appealing post that users will want to read, but it also caters to those of different browsing styles who may disregard plain text posts altogether. Including an image, GIF or short video into your social posts can make it attractive to all types of users and also increase the accessibility of the posts.

6. Add Relevant Hashtags (#) to Your Posts

Another beneficial way of making your post more attractive to users is through the use of hashtags. Not only do these help keywords to stand out in the post itself, they are great for tracking discussion around a specific topic and connecting with people who are using that particular hashtag.

7. Create Polls & Surveys

Another good practice for creating engaging social media posts is through the use of polls and surveys. Social media polls and surveys are super simple for obtaining that needed customer feedback quickly.

The data obtained from polls and surveys are great for future marketing material.

8. Post Frequently (and at optimal times)

Making sure your social media channels are active is vital to show your audience you’re up to date and on top of the latest trends. They want to know what’s happening with your brand at the moment it occurs. Make sure you post content frequently to keep your audience updated and in-the-know.

Frequent posts on a regular basis, (once a month isn’t going to cut it anymore!), can not only keep you followers following you, but also attract more. If you don’t post regularly, you may lose followers. But why?

Social Media Moves Fast

Social media channels move fast. That means once you have posted, it is unlikely that a user will see it a week or even a few days after it’s published. Content is constantly being uploaded all over social sites, particularly Twitter. That’s why for many campaigns, posting up to 3 times spread throughout a day is acceptable to ensure your users actually see your content.

9. Engage With The Latest Trends and Issues

Sharing and liking the latest posts on the trends and issues relevant to your industry is a great way to show support and involvement. Assuming you are sharing or responding to content that is fair and doesn’t spark offence, engaging with these posts will help to strengthen your reputation. You demonstrate to users, whether they are potential customers or not, that you value the social happenings beyond your business which generates respect and admiration for your brand.

10. Use Analytics Tools to Monitor Engagement

Analytics Tools are really helpful in monitoring the levels of engagement on social media, websites and more. You obtain rich insights of data that is perfect for making those needed campaign changes for improvements. From tracking the number of views and the number of link or image clicks to find the optimal times to post and the most successful social media sites for your business.

There are many great tools to measure how engaging your posts are, although we recommend the following:

• Google Analytics

• Twitter Analytics

• Hootsuite

Each analytics tool offers something slightly different so it’s great to experiment with a few to ensure you get the data you need for measuring your social media engagement