7 Ways To Boost Engagement on Social Media
There are over 2.77 billion social network users and the number is only expected to grow. So, any company that cares about their success needs to be active on social media. And yet, since it’s become so essential, now everyone is on social media. Any brand you can think of is there. Think about how many voices that is. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. It’s also easy to lose the attention of your audience.
You need a plan that will allow you to reach your audience more effectively than your competitors can.
And in essence, you already know about quality content and its value in reaching customers. However, you need to figure out what you need to do to make that content stand out. You need engagement and here are some great ways to get it:
Use Social Listening Tools
Your online reputation is the essential part of your brand. It can make or break it. This is why you need to constantly work on it and improve it accordingly. However, how can you know what people are saying about you?
Easy – by using tools like social media listening.
Social media listening tools enable you to know when someone is talking about your brand or mentioning you in general.
You probably think that these tools are crazy expensive and complex. But, you have numerous free choices like:
- Google Alerts
- Hootsuite TweetDeck
- Icerocket
- Topsy
- Brand 24
- Social mentions
Invest in the visual
Visual content goes hand in hand with social media. Using images and graphics have known benefits for the engagement and popularity on social media. In fact, research says that images can bring you 85% more engagement on Facebook and by 35% on Twitter. How’s that for a change in stats?
Creating something like an infographic can cost a lot, depending on what you want and need but you can use free tools like Canva to create decent representations of what you want to tell and show your audience. You can also share someone else’s infographic and get that engagement. You can use many other creative ways to engage with your audience through visual content:
- You can share a behind the scenes picture
- You can showcase a great employee
- You can share old photos of team members
- Ask followers to caption an image – this is especially popular nowadays
- Have a photo contest’
- Share images from an event
- Share a collage of photos
- Create simple and cool infographics
Host games, contests and giveaways
The power of contests, games and giveaways is real. Just choose a social media platform and then share a post with detailed information about a contest, game or a giveaway. There are usually rules that further boost the engagement of the page. For example, the audience has to follow, like, share or comment (or do all of that) to participate. This is great because they usually get a valuable reward or recognition if they win. You can ask them to fill out an entry form, like your page on some other social media platform, share their story about your brand or something similar. Then they would get your product or service as a reward, some other product or service as a reward or something similar. Giving them something is the key.
Besides this, you can enhance the activity on your pages through games. For instance, play mad libs, hangman or boggle. “Hootsuite also recommends games like Ask the Next Friend, What’s your best guess or If your life was a song, movie or a book. These are all simple and easy to set up and they really increase the engagement,” says Ferguson Blueforth, a social media marketer at Draftbeyond and Lastminutewriting.
Ask your audience questions
Another way to make your audience more active is to ask them questions. These can be simple questions or more complex ones, depending on what your ideas are. For instance, ask them to give you advice, give you content ideas, what they want from your brand in the future, what their plans for the weekend are, what movies they like, what they think about a certain topic, something about pop culture and so on. These are all really simple and inquisitive so you can ask them frequently and still have a ton of engagement.
“You can also host a Q&A on any social platform you like and answer questions about your brand or anything the readers want to know about you. A controversial brand shouldn’t try it because it can backfire really quickly. The trolls can also mess with the good spirit of things really quickly, no matter if you are controversial or not. Remember to always take the high road,” says Roger Allbright, a marketing blogger at Writinity and Researchpapersuk.
Be active and participate
No matter if you are a blogger or in a huge industry, linking to authority websites and appearing there can be a huge bonus for your social media account, brand awareness, connections and so on. Just make sure that the information that you are sharing is legit and interesting to your readers. You should also answer questions on Quora or Linkedin and just be generally engaged, not just on your page but on other pages of brands, authorities in your niche and so on as well.
Repurpose your content
Different social media platforms have different users. So, in essence, you could share your Facebook post on your Twitter or Instagram or even Pinterest as well as numerous other social media channels without it being strange or boring. You can create how-to’s for LinkedIn, Quora, or your blog and then turn these into images or Canva infographic when you want to post them on LinkedIn or Quora. The idea is that you can repurpose as much as you want without fearing that you are boring because the audience is different across different mediums.
Be human
So, what does this mean? Well, humans have personalities and so should brands. But, how to do that?
You should start by sharing some information about yourself – something personal and interesting. Then, share some interest, hobbies, recommendations on stuff you like, products you like and so on. Tell them about your day. Identify with their problems and show what problems you often face.
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