Increase Your Social Media Engagement
As you are probably all aware by now, social media is an exceptionally powerful tool to increase the coverage of your business. Nevertheless, advising your readers to simply follow your social media pages is no longer beneficial. There are many activities you could be preforming on your social media platforms and sometimes it can become overwhelming to understand what you should do to increase engagement.
Listed below are ten social media engagement strategies used by any digital marketing agencies to increase engagement with your readers. Introducing these strategies will hopefully strengthen your business’s identity while also increasing the number of followers on all your social media platforms.
1. Keep you Posts Short
On the social media platform Twitter you are actually only allowed 140 characters. However, on other platforms including Facebook and Instagram they have a more generous character limit (but that doesn’t mean you should use it!). Social media users don’t generally want to read a long post and they will quickly become disengaged. Therefore, if you keep your posts short it is more likely that people will read it and this can increase the level of engagement. For example, Facebook posts that are less than 50 characters usually receive the greatest engagement.
2. Conduct Surveys and Polls
On social media, users are always willing to provide an opinion. Therefore, giving your followers an outlet to express their opinion through surveys or polls would be an effective method to increase engagement. It is important to ensure that the surveys and polls are relevant to your products, services and brand to improve engagement. Once your follower’s answer any questions posed you will also acquire valued personal information about them.
3. Create More Visual Posts
Visual content and social media are like two peas in a pod! Research shows that including visual content with your posts can improve the interaction rate on Facebook by 85%. Also on Twitter, posts with pictures are more likely to be re-tweeted. It is important to ensure that the visual content matches the written content; otherwise your followers will become confused and therefore quickly disengaged.
4. Post at the Optimal Time
Many people have a different idea of what time will result in the most user engagement on social media websites. With Facebook especially it is important to note that when there are many users online this doesn’t necessarily translate into high post engagement. Research shows that posts made between 10pm and 12am have the highest level of engagement. However, it is important that you keep track of the reach and engagement of each of your posts so that you are able to see what time specifically works best for your brand.
5. Don’t Post Too Often
Posting numerous times per day on social media doesn’t necessarily translate into increased user engagement. It is recommended that your limit the number of posts on each social media platform to 2 or 3 per day. This will ensure that your post get will get enough attention and that your followers aren’t being continuously bombarded with content.
6. Respond to all Feedback/ Comments (even if it is negative!)
It is important to not ignore your followers if they write a comment on your post. Checking your social media accounts regularly will ensure that you can respond to comments quickly and it therefore becomes more likely that the conversation (and engagement) will continue. Responding to all feedback will prove to your followers that you care about establishing a relationship with them and they will be more inclined to engage with your brand.
This means not creating content that YOU think that they would want to see. You are trying to increase their engagement on your social media platforms; therefore it is all about them! Many businesses seem to believe that all of the content must be related to their industry. The problem with this is that this can become repetitive and therefore boring and quickly disengaging for your followers. It is important to create a balance and extend the variety of content you post.
Hashtags first began on Twitter and have recently continued on to social media sites including Facebook, Google+ and Instagram. Hashtags ensure that your content is easier to find and research shows that tweets with hashtags achieve double the engagement compared to tweets that do not contain hashtags. However, it is important to use hashtags wisely as engagement usually drops if your post contains more than two hashtags.
9. Use the Available Social Media Tools
All social media platforms provide you with a variety of tools that can be used to improve engagement; these tools include, Google Analytics, TweetDeck, Twitter Analytics, etc. These tools provide insights to all the information about your past posts and follower demographics. When looking at these tools you will be able to easily understand the best method to engage your followers.
10. Ask Questions
When posting content, if you ask a question you are more likely to receive engagement through comments. It is important not to make the question to specific or hard: a question that is general and easy is more likely to see a higher level of comments. Holding a live Q&A session will also improve engagement as consumers can ask their own questions and receive the answer almost instantly.
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