Social media is not just about getting the most followers. Engagement is the real measure of your success. Your audience needs to be fully engaged with your social media presence, whether on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram. This is the only way that you can achieve your marketing and brand loyalty objectives. Here are seven tips to help your business improve engagement with your audience.
How do you measure engagement?
Before you try to improve your engagement, you need to know exactly how to measure your success. At the basic level, you can measure engagement by seeing how many times your posts are liked and shared. However, this does not actually prove that your followers are engaging with your brand in a meaningful way. A great way to find out how engaged people are with your content is to see if anyone is commenting on your posts. Comments about what you posted show that at least some of your audience are interested in what you are posting and are willing to tell you about it (whether that’s positive or negative).
Use social media monitoring tools
Once you have decided what you are going to be measuring, you need a way of measuring it. There is a variety of free tools available for businesses to use to track their social media success. Check out Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Snaplytics. Facebook and Twitter have their own tools available to help you see what level of engagement you are getting with your posts. These tools will show you really interesting stats about the sort of person who is engaging with your posts.
Run competitions
Did you know that a great way to get people to engage with your posts is to give them the chance of winning something? You could ask people what their favorite thing to do with your product is and then say that everyone who replies will have a chance of winning some free merchandise. Depending on what your business does, competitions and games could work really effectively. For example, if you are a pen company, then you could run a drawing competition and the winner could have their picture shared on your account. Just ask fun or random questions without any particular competition in mind – for example, “What’s your favorite movie of the last ten years?” Responses from customers may not have anything to do with your product, but they will at least be thinking about your brand.
Use images
Social media platforms, especially Instagram, are great for images. Pictures draw the eye and attract attention. It helps if your product or service is particularly camera-friendly, such as cakes or mountain biking. However, even if you’re a prefabricated warehouse supplier, there are lots of ways for you to come up with great photos. If you and your team organize some sort of charity event, then take plenty of pictures of that and do a post about it. For more engagement, you could come up with some kind of relevant photo competition where followers can share their own images. Remember to tailor your images to each social media platform – here is a guide that will help you make sure that your images are the perfect size for your followers.
Make videos
Alongside images, videos are a great way of catching your followers’ eyes as they scroll down their timelines. Videos can be of anything you want. Perhaps you have a new advert that you want to share with your followers. Maybe you have done an interview with someone important from your industry that you think your followers would find interesting.
Oncotarget has done this on LinkedIn with its interview with Dr. Anutosh Ganguly.
Ask questions
If you are struggling to think of ideas for social media content, then ask your audience. Don’t be afraid to directly ask them what sort of content they would be interested in. Give them options to choose from rather than just asking an open question. This will hopefully give you a better idea of what your followers would be better able to engage with.
Conclusion
Social media engagement is the best way to build a loyal following. The more engaged your followers are, the more interested they will be in spending money on your products and services.
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