Reaching out to your customers on Social media is an important catalyst for brand growth. If planned and executed right it can help businesses boost brand awareness and improve company profits by increasing conversions.
Most marketers have realized that promoting their brand through social media is essential to growing their business. But simply putting out vast amounts of content on these channels will not get you sales. The key to social media success is getting engagement. Adopt the strategies mentioned in this article to increase engagement and achieve business growth.
1. Connect with Influencers
Social media influencers are individuals who have a large number of followers and have the ability to influence their opinions or behavior. They have an influential network, and any brands they engage with are seen in a positive light by their followers. As a marketer on social media, you can start by identifying influencers who have a large following and high levels of positive engagement on their posts. You can offer them incentives such as samples, promos, travel and support their social media efforts in return for their feedback. Remember that they will share their honest feedback with their followers. When an influencer stands behind your brand, it can boost reach, awareness, and followers.
2. Add Visuals to Your Posts
Images, videos, and emoticons are great ways to increase the engagement levels of your social media posts and marketing content in general. These will make your content more appealing to users and also encourage those who may disregard plain text posts to take a look. Adding an image, short video or GIF to your social media posts can make them cut through the clutter and appeal to all types of users. Brands like Coca-Cola and Domino’s Pizza use this post style and get great results.
3. Create Surveys & Polls
Using polls and surveys is a good practice for creating engaging social media posts. Polls and social media surveys are super simple ways to obtain customer feedback fast. It is a good idea to post these polls or surveys during optimal times of the day when your target audience tends to be most active. The information obtained from polls and surveys is very useful for future marketing material. When you get customer feedback on what they expect to see or improvements, they’re looking for you can then incorporate these changes into your marketing efforts.
4. Schedule Posts for Optimal Times
Marketers are always asking themselves what the best times to post on social media are. This is a question that’s often found on social media marketing forums. Studies have shown that the most popular time slots to post are noon, just after lunch and past 7 pm on weekdays. You could conduct a few surveys among your own network to figure out what works best for you. Try putting up posts during morning, evening and night time slots to check which get the most engagement. By scheduling posts ahead of time, you can improve social media engagement. There are tools such as Hootsuite available online that can help you schedule and automate updates across social media networks.
5. Monitor Engagement Using Analytics Tools
Monitoring levels of engagement on social media and websites become a breeze with the help of the right analytics tools. Marketers can obtain great insights that can offer them guidance in making improvements and changes to social media campaigns. These tools can help you track the number of views, image clicks, number of links and help you find the best times to post. You can also identify the most successful social media sites for your business. Some of the best tools to measure the engagement level of your posts are Google Analytics, Hootsuite, and Twitter Analytics. Each of these tools offers something different, so it’s a good idea to experiment with a few and ensure that you get the information you need to gauge your level of social media engagement.
6. Post High-Quality Content at All Times
The first and most basic step to create social media engagement is to create content that people find worthy enough to engage with. This could be anything from a product photo, a graphic that makes people laugh, an entertaining video or a poll on Twitter. Always put out content that’s likely to receive a positive response from people. Ask yourself if your post is relatable, funny, beautiful or inspiring. Go for content that is likely to prompt an emotional reaction from people. Avoid any issues that may be sensitive or polarizing topics.
7. Respond to Comments
You’ll need to express your social side if you want to increase your social media engagement. Treat each message that customers send you or comments they leave on posts as an opportunity to connect with them. You should be responding to each customer, whether they leave positive or negative comments. Thank your followers for positive feedback and try to find resolutions for negative messages. The only time you won’t need to respond to a message is if someone tags their friend in your post as this does not directly involve you.
8. Tag and Mention Your Followers
Tagging your fans is a good way to connect deeper with them and increase engagement on social media. These fans or “Brand enthusiasts” not only follow you on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, they are also committed to your brand. Using the “@” feature to mention them in posts or thank them, shows that you recognize them. This is a technique that is commonly used by social media influencers to thank and acknowledge their fans. People love being recognized by a brand that they follow on social media networks. You may not be able to do this with all your followers, but it is necessary to recognize the dedicated ones. You’ll start to notice a marked improvement in engagement when you begin to do this consistently.
9. Call to Action
A call to action or CTA can help marketers influence their followers to respond the way they want them to by instilling psychological nudges. Many marketers and business owners tend to miss this out when they update their social media pages. When people are given specifics on what to respond to, they are likely to respond better.
Your CTA must be crafted depending on what you want people to do—leave a comment, share your post or click the like button. For instance, you could add simple phrases under photos such as “Like this if you___” or “Hit like if you___.” The right CTAs can help you multiply your likes and shares.
10. Resolve Customer Issues
Social media platforms can be a great way to showcase your customer service. So, if all you’re doing on social media is posting content, you are not harnessing its full potential.
This is referred to as social service care by digital marketers. Many customers use a company’s social media channels to air their grievances. They also expect a fast response on using it. But many companies are not doing all they can when it comes to social service care. On the other hand, there are some brands like JetBlue Airways that have mastered using social media as a customer service channel. Existing and potential customers tend to notice when you use social media to address customer service issues. It also makes people more likely to follow and engage with your social media content.
Final Thoughts
It is essential to consider the strategies mentioned in this article if you’re serious about increasing customer engagement on your social media channels. Some ways to do this are by staying active, posting content on a regular basis and following active social media users. You can also join conversations on trending topics, share other people’s content and address customer grievances on social media. With some consistency, dedication and hard work, you will soon be able to improve your social media engagement significantly.
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