Last updated on February 13, 2020

Social media is a powerful tool, to promote your brand and get it in front of different types of targeted networks quickly. Hubspot recently reported compelling social media marketing statistics including that there are 3.2 billion social media users worldwide. Each person spends an average of two hours and 22 minutes on social networks and messaging, with 54 percent of social browsers using social media to research products.

From an ROI perspective, social media is a cost-effective way to stay top-of-mind and soften the buy cycle through improved reputation. In addition, build and nurture new and existing relationships. Social media also is a quick and easy way to test larger marketing ideas and see if it resonates with your target audience.

While social media marketing can help build awareness around your brand or business, positive and frequent social media engagement can take that one step further by:

• Helping to reinforce your message and increase trust.
• Pushing your social media audience further down the sales funnel, due to strong click through rates on your posts.
• Providing you with a clearer picture of which marketing efforts are working well and what should be tweaked.
• Obtaining insight into your target audience, including what they like hearing and learning from you and what they don’t.
• Connecting your business with your audience, on a deeper level, by enabling you to engage back.
• Producing high quality leads.

Before you can effectively boost social media engagement, you need to have a sound social media strategy. This will pave the way for your content, empower you to track successes and remind you to engage back with your audience.

Social Media Engagement Strategies

Your social media engagement strategies should include:

• Keeping tabs on current trends and holidays, in addition to any upcoming events, launches or campaigns. Think about the unique social media posts you’ll develop to promote these.
• Engaging with any comments, questions and feedback you receive on social media, by responding with a personalized comment.
• Tracking the performance of posts, each month, and expanding on what’s performing well.

Once your strategy is in place, following are some ways to boost social media engagement:

Look at what’s working

A simple way to get started is to analyze what posts have performed well—in terms of likes, comments and shares—in the past few months. Try to repurpose these posts and see if they do just as well the second time around. If so, you’ll know that you’ve found a good topic, post type and copy that you can replicate in other posts.

Analyze and test 

Posts come in all forms, which you can try out, including:

• Status posts that comprise a question
• Branded image that highlights a client testimonial
• Quick video, featuring some tips
• Inspirational quotes
• Infographics
• Links to blog posts, with an interesting statistic or fact caption

Let’s delve a bit deeper on the importance of blog posts and other types of content to boost social media engagement. Just as social media is a critical component to the success of a content marketing campaign that generates leads—by providing a place to build your brand on social and augment audience reach—content marketing that’s done right drives social engagement. You can achieve this by posting content that’s interesting, timely and provides value, in addition to being entertaining and shareable.

It’s important to test various types of posts, to see what resonates and engages your audience. When you figure that out, do more of it!

Some social media engagement tools, to track your results include:

• BuzzSumo – Shows you what topics are trending with your audience and enables you to analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor.
• Canva and AdobeSpark – Allow you to create eye-catching images and videos, to push out on social media.
• Sprout Social or Hootsuite – Help your business monitor social media engagement, in addition to planning and scheduling posts.
• Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and other social media channels – Offer analytics and insights tools.

Spend time each month analyzing which posts gained the best social media engagement and what posts didn’t. Then, readjust your strategy based on those findings. It’s always interesting to track social media engagement metrics, month-over-month, to help notice trends. In addition to just looking at the number of engagements, impressions and clicks, businesses also can track average engagement rate, to see the number of engagements on posts in relation to number of followers.

You can find the number of engagements on posts, by going through the following three steps:

• Adding up all likes, comments and shares a post receives.
• Dividing that by your total number of followers.
• Multiplying by 100, to get your average engagement rate percentage.

Facebook Insights can help you understand who among your audience is most engaged with your page and provides helpful information about the days of the week and times, when most of your followers are online. Also, the types of Facebook posts that receive the highest engagement. Utilize this information to tailor your future content!

Incorporate trends

Incorporating trending topics or holidays—even “social media” holidays like #NationalDonutDay—can help increase social media engagement. People love seeing relatable, lighthearted posts. As such, be sure to include a few, fun, holiday posts in your social media engagement strategy.

Employ tagging

Come across an interesting article topic, that corresponds to your business’s industry lately? If so, make use of that content on your brand’s social networks and tag the writer, to let him/her know what you learned from his/her article, to help with social media engagement. This will assist in establishing you as an industry thought leader, with your audience. An added benefit is that there’s a good chance the writer will comment and/or share your post, for extra exposure and promotion.

Reciprocate

At CMA, we believe that engagement on social media goes both ways. We love seeing engagement on our customer’s social media platforms. However, we know that a big part of effective social media management is to reciprocate and make sure our customer’s audience stays engaged. When you get engagement, give engagement! If a customer leaves a positive comment, respond back by addressing them directly and thanking them for the feedback. You also can ask a question in return. This will help solidify the trust they already have in your brand.

Social Media Engagement Case Study

Do you have an event or launch coming up, that you’d like to build hype around? If so, ask your loyal customers to share it on social media.

CMA tested this method for one of its customers, Event Service Professionals Association (ESPA), by distributing an e-blast to association members to let them know that we’re excited to build awareness around an upcoming event and provided them with copy to post on their social media channels.

Within minutes of the e-blast going out, we began seeing members tweeting about what they were looking forward to most. CMA responded to every comment, on ESPA’s behalf, with personalized messages to build on that excitement. The event, which was once just being seen by ESPA’s audience, now had eyes on it from the followers of each member who shared the message.

To wrap up, social media engagement, like marketing in general, is all about testing out new ideas and seeing what produces the best results. Don’t be afraid to try different, unique ideas in your social media posts. It might end up being your most popular post of the year!

Do you want to boost social media engagement? Contact us today, to begin the conversation.