Top Ways To Get More Social Media Engagement

Updated November 16th, 2022

Business Blog: Top Ways To Get More Social Media Engagement

Engagement rate is one of the most important indicators for any brand or influencer that maintains a social media account or has a website. The higher this indicator, the, in fact, the more active the audience and the larger it is. This means more potential customers.

Therefore, it is logical that the promotion of brands in social networks is, first of all, work designed to increase the engagement rate. But what exactly is it? How is social media engagement changing? And how do you understand that SMM marketing works? That is what we will be talking about today.

What is social media engagement?

The social media Engagement Rate is a metric that evaluates the quality and effectiveness of posts. In this case, many parameters are taken into account at once:

• quantity of publications per day;
• the number of users who visited the community/account during the day;
• quantity of followers who can potentially see your post;
• actual quantity of views of the publication;
• the response of users in the form of likes, comments, and reposts.

The higher the Engagement Rate, the better for your project and your online presence.

Why is social media engagement so important?

You should not consider separately the number of subscribers, likes, and comments to posts. Evaluate the overall involvement – this is the only way to see an objective picture. And by working to increase its level, you additionally get several important advantages:

• growth of positions in search results within social networks;
• increasing brand awareness;
• improved performance in the so-called word of mouth marketing.

And most importantly, the growth of trust. Especially for e-commerce business. Buyers choose Apple not only because of its good components and an operating system worked out to the smallest detail but also because of their trust in the brand.

What is an engaging post

The modern Internet user is lazy by nature, that’s a fact. It will not read the “towel” of text in your business blog. To attract their attention, keep them, and even motivate them to a certain action, you need to work on posts in a complex way as part of website blog design.

Here are just a few tips to help you improve your posts and increase your engagement rates:

1. Don’t forget about images. Never post just text. Pictures attract attention, set the mood, and convey more information. Use it!
2. Post a video. Demonstrations of a product or service, “inner kitchen”, just thematic videos – whatever. This will diversify your content and attract more attention.
3. Ask questions. Each question makes you not just think, but answer it in the comments, chat with you or other users. Discussion under the post is always good.

Well, remember the quality of the text itself, including when you add captions to video. It should be capacious, understandable, interesting, and without water. If you are not sure that you can create high-quality content yourself and effectively promote yourself on social networks, entrust this task to professionals.

How to increase engagement on social media?

If you still decide to increase your engagement rate yourself and not turn to experts, follow our recommendations. For you, we have collected several key rules, the observance of which contributes to the growth of the Engagement Rate.

1. Determination of goals

Posting for the sake of posting is a road to nowhere. The first thing you should do is to clearly define your goals. Why do you maintain social media accounts at all and what results do you want to get from it? Options may vary:

• increasing awareness;
• communication with the target and near-target audience;
• content distribution (viral marketing, word of mouth);
• sales and lead generation;
• customer support, etc.

If you yourself have not decided on the goals, then the content on social networks will be chaotic, poorly combined with each other, and not entirely clear to your target audience. Work on it and your engagement rate will start to rise. And the content plan will be much easier to develop.

2. Create quality content

Actually, everything is obvious here. The more quality and relevant content you post, the better. Save time and money on content.

Answer the actual questions of the audience, work with their pains and objections, talk about something new, demonstrate your expertise, share what you use yourself (for programs, you can use a photo maker or a screen recorder), and show that you are the best in your business!

It will be a great advantage if you develop your own photo style and author’s style. When your posts start to recognize, without looking, that this is a post from your profile, consider that you have already achieved success in working on content.

3. The right time to post

Sometimes the time of publication of posts is more important than the content of these same posts. In this regard, testing is indispensable. But our general recommendations are as follows:

1. Publish posts in the morning and in the evening – when subscribers go to work or return home.
2. Less significant publications can be posted during your target audience’s lunch break. But some of them will still be missed.
3. For the B2C segment, the best publishing days are weekends, but for B2B, weekdays.

These rules maybe 100% work for you, or they may be completely ineffective. It all depends on your target audience, its daily routine, and lifestyle, your offer, and many other parameters. A/B testing is indispensable.

4. Feedback from the audience

You must in every possible way involve subscribers in the dialogue. Ask questions, ask for their opinion, hold polls and voting, make contests, define random winners, and publish the results with infographics, etc.

This is important both for social media algorithms and for increasing your brand awareness. Communicate with subscribers in the comments. If the audience understands that they are writing to nowhere, they simply stop responding to your publications. 

5. Publication of stories and live broadcasts

Notifications about live broadcasts come instantly to your audience. And even if subscribers do not watch them here and now, this serves as a good reminder of you.

Many marketers and SMM specialists even call Stories more important materials than posts in the feed. They engage more audiences and hold their attention better. Yes, and the links sewn into them are very convenient.

6. Post promotion

The most obvious way is to use relevant hashtags. But in recent years, this has not yielded many results. Targeting in social networks shows itself much more effectively.

This is a relatively inexpensive, but great way to reach your target audience and draw attention to your brand. By the way, targeting is also a great way to promote a company’s website on social networks (by Instagram or TikTok for business, Facebook Business Manager, etc.).

7. Partnership

Well, our last advice is to work with partners, and engage in mutual PR. Just do not cooperate with direct competitors, this is a failed undertaking. Try to find companies or influencers that are somehow related to your topic.

Negotiate mutual promotion, offer barter cooperation, or order advertising directly. All this, with a competent approach, works great and helps to reach a huge audience in the shortest possible time.

Conclusion

The level of engagement is one of the key parameters that are taken into account when promoting on social networks.

You have to constantly monitor the analytics, see which publications involve the most audience, what time of day and days of the week the subscribers are the most active, and how they react to your posts in general.

And most importantly – do not underestimate social networks as a channel for promotion and sales.

This is, firstly, a very convenient and cheap platform for promotion. And secondly, it is a great platform for feedback from the target audience. If your brand is still not on social media, then we have only one question: “Why?”.