Top Tips for Boosting Social Media Engagement

Social media engagement is key in telling you if, how and when people respond to your posts. These responses can help you create more effective content, targeting your audiences’ interests, hobbies and expectations.

Strategy

Every company’s goals are different meaning that their social media strategy will be too. From changing people’s perception of your brand to educating your target audience with advice and resources, your strategy will depend on the nature of your business and your objectives.

When developing a strategy for social media one question you must ask is: “What channels should I use?”. Picking an appropriate social platform is key to finding and engaging with the right people; choosing the wrong platform could mean no engagement as you’re targeting the wrong audience.

For example, a luxury beauty brand might use Instagram or YouTube as their content would be very visual with product imagery and video tutorials. Whereas an accountant or solicitors’ firm would be better off using LinkedIn or Twitter, which are more suited to corporate content.

By putting a strategy in place, you will be able to focus on key messaging that will connect your business with people that have a want or need to access your product or service. 

Audience

Knowing your audience will also help you decide what social media sites to be on, when to publish, type of content and brand voice.

For example, the platform, language and tone used in posts is going to be different for a florist compared to a B2B manufacturing company.

Knowing your audience and what they are using your content for will allow you to create and schedule more updates that target their needs. This is an easy way of ensuring engagement as you are supplying answers to problems they currently have or could have in the future.

Content

Content must have a purpose; it needs to have a reason to be posted, whether that is promoting a new product or informing customers of changes to the business.

It’s also helpful to understand formatting for each social platform, for example, colourful visual content is best for Instagram, and longer text posts or videos work for Facebook.

Knowing these things can help boost engagement, but don’t be afraid to get creative with other ideas such as contests, polls, Q&A sessions and custom stickers and filters on Instagram stories.

Overall, the best way to figure out what content is working is to experiment, see the reaction, tweak (if you need to) and repeat.

Stay topical

Piggybacking on to current events and trends is an opportunity to not only connect with an audience but expand your current audience base. Using trending hashtags to increase opportunity for impressions, you can create engaging and effective content.

Trending conversations, big sporting events, awareness days, or viral memes can all be great topics for posts.

The human element

Engagement tends to be higher when the audience can see a human element within a brand. Getting to know the team behind the epic content is a great way of boosting engagement on posts.

You can start with small bios around your team or even pictures of the office when someone bakes a cake! These humanising elements means that people can not only engage with the brand itself but also the people behind it.

Engage with your audience on these posts by responding to comments with a friendly and warm message, answer questions and start up conversations in the comments.

Letting the audience build a rapport with the people behind the brand is just as important as building trust in the brand. If the audience knows that you will engage with them, they will engage with you.

Scheduling

Posting frequently is important to keep your content fresh on your social accounts. Posting at the right time each day is important too and knowing when your audience is most active online can help you determine your schedule for each channel.

Posting when your target audience is most active, will achieve a higher engagement rate on posts and boost the opportunities for your audience to follow any call to action you may have, for example, ‘BUY NOW’ or ‘REGISTER HERE’.

Set yourself some time to schedule your social posts in advance. This will free up time in your week to be more reactive, follow trends and have conversations with your audience. It is these things that can help you build engagement and continue to create engaging content for your audience in the future.

If you need any help boosting your social engagement, get in touch with our team by calling 01522 528540 or emailing hello@weareshootingstar.co.uk

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