Whether it’s Instagram, Facebook or TikTok, the ultimate goal of any social media manager is to improve a brand’s social media presence.
Enhancing social media engagement rate is not achieved overnight. There is no magic button you can push to suddenly get likes, good reactions, and comments on a company’s social profiles.
You need to work hard and consistently to understand your target audience better and engage with them effectively. You should also be equipped with the right tools and strategies. Any large brand like Apple or Amazon has a well-researched and cohesive marketing strategy based on tactics that have proven effective in increasing social engagement over time.
If you are a smaller business trying to develop a strategy to improve your social media engagement rate, we have a few suggestions on where to start. Remember that improving your social presence is not just about looking popular. It’s about connecting with existing and prospective clients to solidify your brand image online and offline.
Now without further ado, let’s jump into it.
What Is Social Media Engagement?
Social media engagement rate is the number of interactions your posts receive on social media or put simply the number of comments, likes and shares. Your goal is to gain more followers, of course. But at the end of the day, you should be aiming for quality, not just quantity. In other words, the biggest measure of success on social media is an engaged audience, not just a large one.
Imagine you hosted a party, and everyone showed up. But they sit there in silence, sipping their wine. No small talk, no laughter, no dancing, no questionable late-night drinking games. Was the party really a success? The RSVP list looks good, but how can you measure whether your guests had fun?
Being active and engaged is critical to building a positive brand experience on any social platform. It helps build meaningful and measurable relationships with new and potential future customers.
There are a number of metrics to measure your social media engagement rate, including
- Shares or retweets
- Comments
- Likes
- Followers and audience growth
- Click-throughs
- Mentions (either tagged or untagged)
- Using branded hashtags
Every time someone interacts with your account, your social media engagement grows, and you can calculate it in several ways. Here’s a list of the most effective social practices and how to track your social media engagement rate.
How to Increase Social Media Engagement Rate?
Ever wondered why your seemingly high-quality content gets little attention on social media? Well, you’re not alone. Despite hard work, many brands struggle to get more engagement for their posts on social media.
The following strategies will help you take the next step to build an active and supportive community across all social media platforms. So let’s focus on improving your online presence and increasing your social media engagement rate. Shall we?
#1 Tap into Powerful Emotions
If every post you make on social media only contains ads and prompts to buy your products or services, you could lose your audience’s attention.
Instead, you need to build an emotional connection with your viewers. Emotion is the primary driver of people’s actions; in most cases, it trumps rationality. And this is nothing new. This has been used in advertising since the beginning of the practice. The emotional connections will make them like, comment or share your post.
The strongest emotions that appeal to people on social media are humour and inspiration. Depending on how your brand is perceived by the public and how you want it to be known, you may need to spice up your tone of voice a bit. Take Nike, for example. Most of their posts on social media are designed to evoke powerful emotions because they perfectly match the essence of their brand and target audience.
You can also use humour regularly in your social media posts to entertain your followers and improve your social media engagement rate. Come up with funny gags that relate to your niche market. Over time, as you learn more about your viewers, you can optimise them based on demographic criteria such as education, nationality, religion, ethnicity, and so on.
#2 Use Visual Cues
A Facebook post without an image gets 120% less engagement on average. Using visual cues is critical to increasing your social media engagement rate. Because compared to written text, we connect much faster with photos, memes, GIFs, or even original graphics. The main reason is that they take less time and are visually more appealing.
You can use PixTeller, Piktochart, and Canva to create unique graphics and add them to your content arsenal. Or, use numerous pre-made templates and personalised designs from websites like Crello. You can create your images from scratch or use a design editor to customise existing imagery with shapes, photos, text, colours, and more.
Another excellent way to make your online presence more natural and intimate is to use emojis. They are now an inseparable part of everyday communication between people, especially for younger generations. And, of course, a business is successful when it adapts to the habits of its fans and speaks the language they speak.
Not only can you give your content a friendly, playful vibe, but you can also use emojis to organise and structure captions and posts. For example, use different icons to indicate other ideas. This makes navigation easier and improves the reading experience for users. It also helps them quickly understand your posts and not skip away without a clue.
Sharing exclusive, never-before-seen content can magically improve your social media engagement rate. Why? Well, for starters, it’s an added incentive for your audience to tune in and be the first to hear about your latest efforts if they are already members of your business community.
When creating exclusive content, make sure it is helpful to your audience. Studies show that 42% of adults do online research before buying a product. So, you can focus your content creation strategy on providing comparable information to help them make a purchase decision.
Another way to improve your social media engagement rate is to leverage your blog articles and email newsletters linked to the website or social media platforms. Your clients will learn what products are coming soon to market and what special features they have. This way, you show customers the unique value of the new products.
#4 Join the Conversation
While you need to take a proactive approach on social media, you don’t always have to be the one to initiate the conversation. User-generated content is a growing revolutionary trend in marketing and has yielded tremendous results in recent years. The reason is that user-generated content gives customers a voice and a place in your business, encouraging them to engage with you even before you join the conversation.
Surprisingly, so many members of your online community are more than willing to create their own content. A recent study found that more than 33 percent of consumers cheer for their favourite brands when a milestone or achievement is shared on social media. To keep the momentum going, you can reply to their posts, share them on your own channels, and tag them, so they know you noticed.
Even better, use carefully chosen hashtags to build an active community around this user-generated content. This creates a network between you and your customers that amplifies your impact and reach.
#5 Influencer Marketing
One of the fastest growing trends among marketing strategies is influencer marketing. Social media influencers today play a critical role in building the brand image of companies because of their ability to increase social media engagement. They are top-notch content creators with a huge follower base, and more importantly, they know what their audience wants.
There are several ways to improve the impact of your content through influencers. For example, you can host an influencer takeover, where selected influencers take over your social media account for a few hours or a day. This is a common trend, especially on Instagram and Snapchat, which can skyrocket your social media engagement. Another option is to feature influencer content on your own social media profiles or post a video featuring an interview with an influencer.
Another underrated strategy is to work with micro-influencers, which has several benefits. First, audiences trust micro-influencers because they are more authentic. More than half of social media users prefer to follow micro-influencers than celebrity influencers because they seem more like regular people.
Plus, micro-influencers are more affordable and more available compared to macro-influencers, so you don’t have to book them six months in advance or pay a fortune for a 10-minute interview.
#6 Keep Up The Good Work
Consistency is the first principle of any business strategy. You can’t achieve engagement on social media if you only show up once in a while. Some of your prospects and potential customers might be motivated to browse old content to see what you’ve been up to lately. But chances are, this is a one-time encounter. Next time, they’ll want something new and shiny, and every time after that.
That’s why consistency is so critical when it comes to building an active social media presence. And, of course, posting quality content regularly can be the biggest challenge in your marketing efforts. One way to streamline your workflow is to automate your social media activities.
That way, you can ensure you’re showing up regularly in your followers’ feeds without interrupting everything else in your life to post content. However, you should be careful to maintain a balance and not annoy your audience. Based on previous analytics, you can determine the optimal posting frequency and content type for your audience.
Consistency is essential to your social media marketing strategy. You could argue that it’s a strategy in itself! To build brand awareness and successfully increase your audience’s engagement and reach, you also need to be consistent in terms of your brand’s voice, content style, and so on. The cherry on the top, it can help you build credibility, build trust, generate leads, and improve your reputation.
Bottom Line
Social media engagement comes with challenges, and no business can survive with a poor social presence. Social media engagement can help your business optimise your marketing strategy so that more prospects interact with your content and follow your company on social media.
If you do not know where to start, Broadweb is here for you. We have a team of social media experts who can help you create a social media campaign. Contact us and take your business to the next level.
