How to Boost Social Media Engagement – A Guide for Marketers

Social media engagement should not be considered a formal event. Instead, treat it as if you were hosting a dinner party. A solid social media presence signifies that modern brands have an online presence.

It’s not about being famous. It’s about creating meaningful connections with customers. This will increase brand awareness and ROI.

Please continue reading to find the ultimate guide to building, managing, and measuring social media engagement, as well as all the business benefits that it brings.

What is Social Media Interaction?

Measurement of social media engagement refers to comments, likes, or shares.

You want to grow your following, but the ultimate measure of social media success, and not just a large one, is an engaged audience. Quality is what you need to be focusing on as a business.

Imagine throwing a party with tons of people, but everyone sits there and watches. No dancing, no small talk, no conversations, no questionable drinking games. Was it a great success? Although the RSVP list looks great, did your guests have fun? Do they like your dip?

Activity and engagement are crucial for any social platform to establish a positive brand experience.

You can use a range of metrics to measure social network engagement, including the following:

• Branded hashtags
• Comments
• Shares or retweets
• Followers and audience development
• Likes
• Mentions (either tags or untagged).
• Click-throughs

The basic idea behind social media engagement is that it grows whenever someone interacts with your account. This can be calculated in many different ways. Here’s a complete list of social metrics and how to track them.

How to Increase Social Media Engagement

Although you could wait for your followers to start talking and then get more chatty, there are many tricks to help you get the party started and increase your engagement.

Select your Strategy

There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Each company’s goals and social media strategies will differ.

Depending on the brand you represent, and what your company has to offer, your goals for social media engagement might include:

• Knowing your audience
• Developing new customer leads
• Changing your brand’s image
• Using resources and advice to educate your audience
• Collecting feedback regarding new products

It is challenging to engage people if you don’t know who you’re talking to.

Skateboarding companies will need to use different languages, tones, or resources to resonate with gardening supply shops.

• What social media sites should you use?
• What is your brand voice?
• What is your type of content?
• Your audience will also help determine your success.
• When should you publish?

Analyze your Engagement

It isn’t easy to measure your growth when you don’t know where you started.

Don’t forget your data scientist hat! Keep track of your current followers, the number of comments and shares per post, and any other numbers that are important to you.

Also, make sure you keep track of your engagement so you can catch spikes or dips that could give you valuable clues as to what’s working (or not).

These tools will help you save time when getting started in social media analytics.

Stay Current

You don’t know what topic you should be discussing on any given day. You can join a conversation already in progress. You can instantly connect with your audience by commenting on current events or trends in a way that ties in with your brand.

Create and Share Valuable Content

You now know who follows you and why. Now you’re ready to answer the crucial third “W”: what do I say?

It is essential to provide relevant and helpful content to the audience. You should think “conversation” and not “broadcast.”

It’s more challenging to connect with people if you only talk about the quality of your brand or what you have to offer.

Posting photos of the latest tees will only get your company so far. Sharing fashion tips and advice on how to style a tee to wear to a marriage is a great way to offer unique service to your customers. Your followers should be encouraged to share their “wedding shirt stories”!

• Asking questions
• Contests
• Encourage your audience members to ask questions. Consider a “Ask Me Anything” session.
• Polls
• Media upload contests
• Check their knowledge
• Animated Gifs
• Instagram Stories filters and stickers
• Spotlighting customers

The best way for content to be successful is to learn from others. It’s a great job to be a content scientist. Experiment; watch the reaction, tweak, repeat.

Keep the Conversation Going

Although some people may consider conversation an art form, others see it as a sport. It involves asking questions and receiving attention.

You also need that give-and-take. Brands must practice both reactive and proactive engagement.

You respond to direct messages, comments, and mentions.

If you are proactive, you can spark conversation with people talking about you but haven’t yet sent messages to you. They might have mentioned you using a misspelled brand name. You have the chance to reach out and say hi, regardless of what.

Launch search streams on your Hootsuite dashboard to track these indirect mentions, so you don’t miss a chance for the conversation to continue.

Be Prompt in Responding

Hootsuite offers a Saved Replies function that allows you to prepare responses to common questions. If you receive a FAQ, you will be prepared with an informative and thoughtful response.

Your team will provide more support (and human touch!) by being quicker in responding. Customers are likely to be happier.

By writing your answers beforehand, you can ensure that the tone of the conversation is friendly, warm, and helpful.

If you don’t want to, you don’t even need to write them. Answer enough similar questions, and Hootsuite can suggest replies based upon your past responses. It’s similar to G-Chat’s Google suggested replies feature.

Because they are based on your answers in the past, they will still sound natural and consistent with your brand.

• Hootsuite Social Networking Scheduling Tool

Set aside some time every day to schedule posts and another time to respond to reactive and proactive questions. Once that’s achieved, you can get on with your day or laugh at other hedgehog memes.

• Schedule Smarter

You should post once or more per day to keep your content relevant and fresh on social networks. You should also post at the correct time each day to ensure that as many people see your sweet hedgehog meme as possible.

It’s impossible to be on your computer all the time, but scheduling tools such as Hootsuite allow you to plan and prep your posts.

• Hootsuite Inbox Suggested Replies

Hootsuite Inbox is a tool that allows you to keep track of all your comments, DMs, and other communications in one place. See how it works below.

Hootsuite has a few more dashboard features that will help increase your productivity and keep you engaged.

• Tags: You can use this feature to tag positive engagements and track them so that you can quickly include them in your weekly or monthly reports.
• Streams: Instead of looking at each social network individually, you can use streams in your dashboard to see all the incoming messages.
• Lists: You can create Twitter lists based upon specific industries, hashtags, or events. Then, set them up in a stream to facilitate monitoring and encourage proactive engagement.

Display Your Human Side

It’s much easier to get involved with a brand when you believe there’s someone on the other end. It is. So don’t hide it.

Brands often encourage their social staff to sign off on any posts. You don’t have to be named. There are alternative ways to get personal.

• Do more than retweeting, liking, and commenting to spark a conversation.
• Recognize and answer any questions.
• Use humor or warmth to respond to comments.
• In photos and videos, show the people behind your brand.

You can get to know me on my About Me page as I have never had anything to hide about myself, my business and how I got to where I am today.

 Think Beyond the Feed

Although comments and shares are great, these public engagement displays are not the only way to demonstrate that your audience cares.

Also, private conversations such as story interactions or direct messages are potent examples of engaged audiences. Make sure you treat them right and track their numbers!

Similar to the previous point, you don’t have to go alone when dealing with social media wilds. You might also want to have a social dashboard, a must-have. Here’s what you should include in your emergency kit.

• Photo Editing

Canva makes it simple to crop photos to match the specifications of different networks. Hootsuite Compose allows you to edit photos and add text and filters.

• Video Editing

Research shows that video generates 1,200% more social media shares than images and text. Clips app for iPhone allows you to quickly and easily create videos, music, or frames from scratch. (Funimate for Android is very similar.)

• GIFs

GIFs are the leading international language on the internet. Giphy lets you type in any keyword such as “excitement” and “dog” to access an extensive library of animations that will add some fun to any engagement.

• Analytics

Hootsuite Insights gives you a comprehensive overview of all your engagement efforts. It also reports on specific keywords. Brandwatch, however, provides in-depth reports that capture every social conversation about your brand and industry.

How to Measure Social Involvement?

Now that there are so many comments and shares, it’s time for you to crunch some numbers to show how extraordinary your job has been.

It is essential to measure the success of your brand using social media analytics.

You have many options to view your social stats and get a general overview. It is also worth considering calculators to calculate social ROI and engagement rates.

You can also track your social platform’s effectiveness. While the exact metrics may vary for each social media site, there are always juicy insights to be gained.

Combine all these tools, and you can access some severe social information.

Here are the top social media platforms you will find:

Facebook

Facebook Analytics offers a robust dashboard with many ways to track audience engagement.

These metrics can be tracked via the popular social media platform:

Reach and engagement: How often did your posts get seen? Which people interacted with them? What posts did they hide? What posts were reported as spam?

Actions: What actions can people take on your Page? How many people click the call-to-action buttons? How many users click on your call-to-action button?

People: What demographics are there for the people who visit your Page and why? (You can dig deeper into this topic using Audience Insights. When do people visit your Page? How do people find your Page?

• Views: How many people view your Page? What sections are they viewing?
• Posts: How have your posts performed over time?

Twitter

Twitter has several tools that you can use to measure your metrics.

You can monitor the following metrics on Twitter:

• Engagement rate: How Many impressions and engagements did it receive?
• Reach percentage: How many of your followers saw the tweet you sent?
• Clicks on links: How Many Click-Throughs Did a Posted Link Get?
• The best time to post: When is your audience most likely online? What time zone does your audience live in?

Instagram

Business profiles can access Instagram Insights. This will allow you to track your Instagram activity. This dashboard will give you all the key metrics in social media engagement to help you plan your campaign. This dashboard is not highly robust, but it’s worth looking at.

Instagram Insights lets you track the following metrics:

• Audience demographics: Where do they live and work? Which gender are they? How old are they?
• Optimal Times: When is your audience most active online? What days and times do they use to be online?
• What is the most popular content? What posts get comments?

You can also read an entire blog I recently did on How to Make Money Online With Instagram in 2022.

TikTok

Everyone and their mom is on TikTok now – maybe your brand should be too.

It can be daunting to sign up for a new social network – analytics help eliminate all the guesswork involved in content strategy.

Pro accounts can access insights, which include the following metrics.

• Audience demographics – What is my follower increase? What are they reading and listening to? How do they identify themselves?
• Content stats – Which videos have been viewed the most this week? What’s the average play-time? How many likes, comments, and shares has my video received?

Conclusion on How to Boost Social Media Engagement

Social media engagement, however you define it is about putting “social” back into social media. You can have a great time with friends or at a big event. If you show love and concern for others, you will get it back.

It is possible to make a livelihood online if you put in the effort and stick with it. Free and fast money is out there for the taking. So, which online businesses are you trying first?

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Mark

CEO and Founder of The Retired Affiliates