Social Media Engagement – How To Get It Right (2023)
Social media engagement can be a tricky thing to master or even get right. If you don’t have the right approach, you won’t get the kind of engagement that is good for your business. That’s why we will show you how to get it right. We will discuss what exactly social media engagement is and how the ways to increase yours.
The social media marketing industry is growing ever-bigger with more and more companies making use of its benefits. More than $89 billion has been spent on social media advertising in 2019 alone. If you’re not using it as part of your digital marketing strategy, what are you even doing?
If you didn’t know enough about social media marketing and engagement, stick around, we will show you the way.
Let’s get right to it.
What Is Social Media Engagement?
In the shortest possible terms, social media engagement is when people interact with your brand on social media.
This engagement can happen in many forms. You’re most likely to see it in the form of comments, shares, follows, likes, retweets and click-throughs. Basically, any way that people are reacting to and interacting with your social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter is classified as social media engagement.
This engagement is important to see how successful your social media marketing strategies are and if you’re accomplishing your desired goals.
The point of social media is to be social but many brands and companies get it wrong. That’s why their campaigns fail and they don’t see the results they were hoping for.
Usually, they take one of two approaches. Either they focus completely on themselves or they invite users to share in their social media experience.
Which one do you think has the most success?
Rather than having a one-sided dialogue about your brand on social media, you should be engaging with your audience. It’s that simple. Of course, doing this takes many forms and can be done in various ways.
No following wants to talk to a faceless brand, so show them your human side. They want real people to talk to and have real connections with. Good engagement will show your followers and audience that there are real people behind your brand. This will increase trust and brand loyalty.
One way to really show your audience that you are open and ready for engagement is by answering questions and giving support. Nike, the well-known brand, actually has a whole Twitter account dedicated to customer support. This has boosted their social media engagement and loyalty.
GoPro has more than 16 million Instagram followers, over 2 million Twitter followers and more than 10 million Facebook followers. Why? Because they know how to create value on their platforms. The brand is constantly interacting with customers and showing their human side.
Importance Of Social Media Engagement
While building brand loyalty and creating a safe environment for your followers is important, there are many other reasons why engagement matters.
Your brand needs to build and enhance your relationships with your audience and social media platforms are awesome for doing that.
Engagement helps to show social proof of how good your brand’s products or service is. Your audience will see that you have many people who like your brand and notice all the engagement you’re getting. This will go a long way towards them deciding that if so many people are happy with you, they will be too.
Your marketing reach is also greatly expanded with social media engagement. Because your audience can be global, your reach goes beyond just where you are based. People from all over the world can contact you and interact with your brand. As you can guess, this means that people everywhere can become customers.
Another important benefit of social media engagement is brand awareness. This flows in with your marketing reach. If more people are engaging with your brand, more are seeing and becoming aware of you. When someone likes or shares something on your social media account, their friends will see you. In the long run, this is great and free advertising.
It is also important to measure your social media relationships and keep an eye on how they are performing. Any social media interaction with a community member or customer can result in positive results for your brand. Watch the long-term and short-term effects of your interactions to see if your strategies are working.
Having a good strategy is vital. Without a plan of action, there is no order to what you do and your results will be chaotic.
Increasing Your Social Media Engagement
It may not sound like something you need to do, but you should have a very well-thought-out plan. You may wonder why you need to strategise your interactions with your audience on social media. Well, every action has a reaction, right? The way you handle your audience on social media does too. So, if you want good reactions, you need to have a strategy.
With a proper strategy, you will make the most of every single engagement on your social media accounts. Naturally, this will benefit your brand.
Of course, the strategies that you have will be different from the strategies that other companies have. There is no ‘one size fits all’ strategy. However, there are some key points that every strategy needs to address.
They are:
Goal Definitions
You need to know every goal that you wish to accomplish with your social media engagement. This will be influenced by what your brand has on offer what will suit your company.
Have a clear outline of how you will use engagement to benefit your brand or company.
An educational account, for example, will be focused on sharing advice and resources while also answering questions.
Some examples of goals:
- Finding new leads
- Improving brand perception
- Getting feedback from audience
- Providing important information
- Reaching wider audience
Know Your Audience
We talk about this often when discussing marketing strategies. Knowing who you’re talking to is vitally important. If you don’t, how will you know what to say?
You have to get into your audience’s head, so to speak. You have to give them what they want to see from your brand on social media. If you just guess what your audience wants, you will not get the kind of engagement that you want and need.
Spend a lot of time on getting to know your audience’s needs, pain points, desires and wants. Then work on plans on how you can offer solutions and give your audience exactly what they’ve been looking for.
When you listen to your audience, you will get a lot of social media engagement.
Take a look at this example from Pop-Tarts. By asking their audience how they like to use their popular treats, they got a lot of engagement.
pls join this heated debate https://t.co/emarUm8mYY
— Pop-Tarts (@PopTartsUS) May 12, 2020
Offer Valuable Content
There are many ways that you can go about creating great content that will be of value to your audience. If you need a few ideas, check out our guide ‘Content Strategy For 2023’. We share lots of important and useful ideas and advice that will point you in the right direction.
If you are struggling to find fresh ideas, you can always consider content curation. Even the most seasoned content creators share content from industry leaders or influencers. It helps to add more value to what they already have. If you have a decent content marketing strategy, chances are you’ll have content curation as one of your plans.
There are many places where you can introduce your audience to your curated content. You can do so on social media, in emails, on your blogs and in your newsletters. Wherever you are sharing your own content, there is a place for curated content.
Always Remain Topical
This is one of the best ways to always get social media engagement from your audience. Make sure that you are always topical and ‘in-the-know’ about the trending events that matter to your audience.
If you stay aware of what is going on, you will find that you don’t have trouble creating new content. You will have something to talk about with your audience. And this equals organic social media engagement.
If you’re part of the current trends, you can easier and more effectively connect with your audience. They will also see that you know what matters to them and are involved in your community. Examples of trending content are pop culture news, trending hashtags, sports events and holidays.
Here’s an example of Nike staying on top of trending news. With the protests about racism in America being on everyone’s minds, they joined the conversation.
Have In-Depth Brand Personas
If you have a clear image of who your audience is, you will know exactly how to speak to them. With good brand personas, you will be able to give your brand a personality that is relatable for your audience. You will be able to connect with your audience and this will drive social media engagement heavily.
Creating brand personas take a lot of time and research. This goes beyond simply knowing who your audience is. With brand personas, you know your audience’s hobbies, income, dislikes, preferences, social standing, age and more.
Having this information goes a long way to being the kind of brand that your audience wants to reach out to and engage with.
Proactive Engagement
You don’t want to sit around and wait for your audience to start engaging with you. Go after them and be proactive. (Just don’t be overbearing or aggressive!)
How can you be proactive? Answer direct messages as they come in, respond to comments and mentions.
If someone is out there mentioning your brand, make sure you know and react appropriately. Thank them for thinking about you. If they are complaining, reach out and try to solve the issues as quickly as possible.
Show your audience that you are there and ready for them. Social media engagement doesn’t only have to take place in your account’s comment section. It can happen anywhere that your audience is spending time.
With good proactive engagement, you could even create buzz around your brand yourself. This is promotion that you don’t pay for and that doesn’t feel like a sales gimmick.
Make Time
It can be difficult to dedicate the necessary time to your social media accounts. That’s why it would be wise to appoint someone to do this full-time. Don’t allow whoever is in charge of your social media engagement to get lost in the social media vortex. (It’s easy!)
Consider also having a schedule that determines when you share content with your audience. Perhaps make use of a tool such as SocialPlanner. It will help you save a lot of time and prevent minor panic attacks when searching for fresh content.
Try to always have someone who is ready and able to react to mentions, questions and direct messages. Of course, no one can work 24-hours a day so have a plan for when your accounts will be ‘inactive’. Make sure your accounts are not inactive during the peak times when your audience is most active.
Tools To Help With Social Media Engagement
There are many tools that will be useful for engaging with your audience and we will discuss some of our favourites here. You can use some of them or all of them, it’s up to you and your brand to make that decision.
Social Plugins
You will find that there are many social plugins available that can help increase engagement. One such tool is Facebook Share API and this allows your followers to share your content and posts on their pages. Even content from your websites can be shared thanks to this tool.
This will increase user engagement as well as your visibility and reach. There are many, many more plugins so do some research about them.
Live Videos
Videos are a very popular media format and are known to increase social media engagement a lot. It certainly does so more than images do. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use images or plain posts. Just work in a few videos every now and then.
Live videos are much more appreciated than pre-recorded videos – people like seeing things ‘in the moment’. In addition, these videos allow your users to interact with you in real-time, boosting engagement.
Conversations
A very simple but effective tool for increasing your social media engagement is having conversations. You can ask your audience questions, request some feedback from them and even create polls.
This will show your followers that you value their opinions and input. And, of course, when they answer or reply, your engagement goes up.
Track Your Social Media Engagement
Of course, you will want to track the success of your strategies and find out if they’re being as useful as you hoped. There are specific ways to do this and it will be different depending on the platform in question.
Here’s a brief look at how to track your social media engagement on the most popular platforms (which you really should be using).
Fortunately, Facebook Analytics gives you a robust and useful dashboard that has more than one way of tracking engagement. You can keep tabs on page insights over periods of a day, a week or 28 days. You can also look at posts that are worth boosting with an advertisement. These are the pages that received a lot of engagement already. It is also possible to see how many people have liked your posts.
The reach of your Facebook posts can also be monitored with Facebook Analytics. This can be useful for any marketing strategy.
This social media platform also has a set of tools that will help you keep an eye on your performance. You can track your monthly performance to see followers, impressions and mentions. Impressions are the number of times that a certain tweet has been seen by Tweeps.
You can also see how many times users have interacted with your tweets. This is great for seeing if your engagement is reaching the levels you want it to. The retweets, likes and comments your tweets get are your engagements.
In addition, you will be able to get demographic information about your audience such as gender, location and thematic interests. Having that could help you get a better idea of your brand personas.
Brands who have business profiles (you really should) will be able to keep track of their performance through Instagram Insights. You will see all your impressions and your reach with this data. It is also possible to see profile visits and website clicks, which shows engagement.
Snapchat
You can see if you’re getting any social media engagement on Snapchat by looking closely at your view time, unique views and the screenshots taken of your content. Snapchat is a very busy and quick-moving platform so you may have to work harder to get engagement here.
Final Thoughts On Social Media Engagement
Social media engagement measures your likes, comments and shares, likes and is a common metric for evaluating social media performance. Although it doesn’t necessarily translate to sales, getting your engagement right goes a long way to increasing your marketing success.
There you have it – the main points of getting social media engagement on your accounts. Of course, these ideas and tips will only help you to go in the right direction. The actual work is up to you. If you want to learn more about digital marketing, be sure to visit our blog. We love sharing tips, advice and useful information with our readers.
