Social media is one of the leading ways brands market themselves to their target audience. But posting alone is not enough.
Beyond brand awareness, you should be looking to develop brand affinity and advocacy by increasing your audience’s engagement with your content and marketing messages.
So how exactly can you increase your social media engagement?
Review your social media strategy
If you’re struggling with social media engagement, you first need to check one thing:
Is your social media strategy right for your target audience?
One of the main reasons people don’t engage with content on social media is because it doesn’t feel relevant to them. Make sure that your social media content is right for your audience’s age, gender, interests, and goals (aka their buyer persona).
1. Post regularly
Posting regularly is crucial to increasing engagement on social media.
Unfortunately, not every post on social media has an equal chance to be shown. Social media algorithms prioritise posts from brands and users that frequently provide them with content and keep the news feeds full.
While not every post you put out (especially at the start) may get high levels of engagement, regular posts will help your content get prioritised by the algorithms and reach more users – thus increasing the potential engagement you can get.
Tip: Plan and schedule your posts in advance to take the hassle out of posting regularly.
Read more: What should you be posting on social media?
2. Post at the right time
When trying to increase engagement on social media, the time of your post can make a huge difference.
Think about:
• When your target audience is online?
• What mood and frame of mind are they in at different points of the day/days of the week?
• When is there more competition for attention and engagement?
All of these factors can play a big part in how much engagement your posts get. For example, if you want engagement around a serious topic or detailed piece of research you will be more likely to be successful if you post this during the week when your audience is in ‘work-mode’ compared to the weekend when audiences are looking to relax.
If you’re unsure about when to post, use what you already know about your audience to answer the questions above and form your preliminary post schedule. Once you’ve got some baseline data you can start testing different times and days to see when you get the highest levels of engagement.
Many social scheduling tools provide analytics and insights to help you improve your post times for engagement.
3. Include hashtags
A big reason many brands struggle to get engagement on social media is that they’re not reaching a large and/or relevant audience. By adding hashtags to your posts, you can appear in front of people who are interested in those topics even if they’re not following you on social media.
4. Tag others
Another way to increase the reach of your posts and make sure relevant users see your content is to tag other brands/influencers in the comments or in the post itself.
Not only does this encourage the tagged brand or influencer to engage with your post, but it will also expose your content to their followers who may find your content interesting.
Tag brands you’ve collaborated with, start a conversation with relevant brands in the comments, or share a piece of their news and include a tag.
5. Make your post visual
It’s no secret that visual content – i.e. videos and images – generally performs better on social media. Users have so many things to look at that you need a strong visual to capture their attention and stop their scrolling.
Beyond simply using videos and images on social media, make sure that the imagery you’ve chosen aligns with your audience’s demographics and preferred styles.
6. Use relevant and clear CTA’s
If you’re not asking your audience to engage, how are they supposed to know what to do?
No, you don’t have to tell people to like your post… BUT you should be telling them about more advanced actions they take e.g. “tag a friend who needs this”, “buy now on our website”, and “comment below if you’ve tried this”.
Not all users will immediately think to engage in these ways, but by giving them a clear call to action you can plant the seed in their minds and increase their engagement potential.
7. Engage with others
When it comes to social media engagement, you get back as much as you give. I.e. if you’re not engaging with others, don’t expect to receive engagement on your own content.
When people reply to your posts, send you messages, or mention your brand, make sure you respond quickly with something personalised to the individual or brand who has engaged with you.
You should also engage with content besides your own by reacting to, commenting on, and sharing others’ social media content.
Remember, your followers can see what you engage with so try to focus on engaging with content that is relevant to their values and your brand.
Want to improve your social media engagement?
Here at Logic Digital, we love working with brands to develop social media strategies that deliver relevant and engaging content for all types of audiences.
Get in touch with our team to discuss how we can help your business.