Jitendra RauloAccording to a report by DataReportal, around 3.96 billion people across the world use social media today. In the light of these statistics, marketers simply cannot disregard the power of social media networks when planning their digital marketing strategy.
Yet, the most significant power of social networks is perhaps their unifying influence on the world at large and social engagement of your audience. Hence, the basics to increase social media engagement can extend to everyone equally.
Big brands approach their social media campaigns with big budgets. However, the basic principles of such successful campaigns can be repurposed to boost your social media presence at any budget.
How to increase social media engagement & its importance
There are several ways to boost your social engagement such as sharing valuable content, conducting live sessions, partnering with influencers, etc. But first, let’s look at why it is important to improve your social engagement.
First things first, the more people engage with your posts, the higher chances of strengthening your relationship with the audience; that is one of the main reasons to increase your social media engagement. Moreover, it gives you an opportunity to offer a stellar experience to your clients or prospects.
Apart from that, engaging with the social media audience will also help you build a loyal audience as you’ll always be available to your clients when they need you, offer solutions to their problems, and more. This way, they’ll always come back to you and thus increase your sales as well!
7 Tips to Improve Your Social Media Engagement
The success of any marketing campaign depends on the careful execution and consistency of the underlying strategy.
However, when marketing on social media, the consistency of your strategy can only get you so far. You need creativity if you intend to open a dialog with your prospective clients and steer the conversation towards establishing a retentive relationship.
It is not so much as what you say, but getting your prospective client to talk to you that is at the core of a successful social media marketing strategy.
Now that we have established the direction you need to follow, here we chalk out the steps that will boost your social engagement as you move ahead.
Let’s dive right in!
- Identify Your Target Audience
Starting at this point is important so you can concentrate your efforts even before you begin.
Social media networks can open your business to the whole world and yet, the whole world is not your audience.
Your prospective customers are out seeking a solution that you manufacture or offer as a professional service. You need to cater to this particular group of people when you conceptualize and design your social media strategy.
All aspects of your campaign, including your social media posts, advertising strategy, comments, and contests need to appease and appeal to this group of people.
Often if you cast your net too wide with your audience targeting, the results for your social media efforts will be quite late in development. However, if you know who your audience is, you can research trends that are currently popular for that niche of personas.
A competitive analysis of brands that interest this group can give you a wealth of information. You can use this information to improve not just your social media experience but your product or service quality as well.
Simply taking this first step can already widen your information pool for how you should design your social media marketing. You can use this information to streamline your content strategy to start the entire experience on the right foot.
- Post Highly Relevant Content Regularly
When designing a social media marketing strategy, people value creativity more often than not.
Common sense dictates that when you are browsing on your personal social media channels, you tend to unfollow, unlike, or ignore the content that is not relevant to you. When planning your social content strategy, you can bet your customers will follow the exact same principle.
If you plan to engage your prospects through social media efforts, a lack of relevant content can lead to failure.
Research specifically on what your clients will want to see from you. Plan your content along with those topics. You can have full creative freedom to design your content in a way that stands out. However, it should not stand meaningless or without any purpose.
Once you have established relevance, emphasize consistency. Your audience will only remember you if they consistently see you on their feed. If you are not posting, your competition most likely will. Prepare a social media calendar in advance so you never miss out on getting in front of your audience.
As a side note, do not overdo it. Posting 10 times a day will not necessarily have any better outcome than posting a couple of times per day. And more importantly, don’t just prepare engagement posts for social media, leverage other forms of posts as well such as stories or live sessions.
- Publish More User-Generated Content
If you are aiming to create engaging posts for social media, consider sharing user-generated content! When you start to publish user-generated content on your profile, your strategy starts working on two levels:
First, it becomes more inclusive, bringing your brand closer to the audience.
Second, it starts the dialog that paves the way for more audience interaction.
There are a few ways that you can fuel this strategy:
- Encourage more followers to post their experience working with you or a testimonial video about your services. Request them to tag your business to these images or videos.
- Users might have already posted some content that displays your brand or what you offer, in unique ways. Search the various social media channels to locate such existing content and ask for the publishers’ permission for reposting rights. You can post this content on your corporate social profile and tag the user for credit.
- Create a custom hashtag for your user-generated content to track them as soon as they are published. This way even your users will know the hashtag they should use to better showcase your services.
User-generated content improves your brand visibility but more importantly, these are validations that potential clients are more likely to trust compared to paid promotions.
- Invest in a Multi-Channel Strategy
The one guarantee with social media channels is that trends change and so does the priority of the channel. Twitter enjoyed its share of undefeated popularity before it was set aside by the arrival of Facebook.
Today Instagram is competing with YouTube and TikTok for the top spot.
A multi-channel approach will ensure that your social media content is repurposed for maximum value across all channels. For instance, you can transcribe your YouTube videos to written content that can be repurposed on Facebook or LinkedIn as detailed posts.
Further, a multi-channel approach also covers the fact that your audiences might be scattered over different social networks, geographic locations, and cultures. With a creative strategy, you leave no audience behind when you shine the spotlight on your brand.
For instance, research has proved that adding subtitles can significantly improve the effectiveness of your communication and increase the cross-cultural appeal of your content.
If you are spread too thin for time, consider outsourcing some aspects of your strategy. Professionals like Happy Scribe’s transcription services can help with transcribing your video to texts for you. You can also use the transcription service to add subtitles to your social media videos.
- Reply to Audience Comments
A rigid posting schedule is a point where you begin, but if you are leaving your strategy at that, it is a rookie mistake.
The posts are meant to be conversation starters, so be sure to engage in the conversation. This means you have to reply to the comments from your users on your social media posts. Don’t just stop at that, start a dialogue. Encourage more users to join in the same conversation if it is relevant to their situation.
Monitoring the comments section for each post is non-negotiable. Your social media strategy should account for the time you carve out just for this. When responding to comments try to mention the user’s name to personalize the reply.
Wherever possible motivate your users to comment back on your posts. For this, you can use strategic tools like calls-to-action, a stirring commentary, or politically correct sarcasm.
- Ask Smart Questions
Questions are a great way to have conversations on your social media platforms. However, just any question might not evoke a response. You have to dress your question up with creativity.
A smart way of asking questions to a large audience is to provide multiple choices as possible answers.
Another possible way is to creatively put a user problem into a question. In this case, you are making the problem a part of the community and pulling your business into the conversation at the same time. More users will empathize with the issue, and you can highlight the solution to establish your expertise.
Finally, take the help of illustrations and graphics to dress up your questions. You don’t have to chase perfection for these illustrations. They have to just put your point across with a visual impact.
For instance, Zomato puts up social media posts with cool graphics that are just a bit rough around the edges. The posts perform better with these illustrations, and the rawness of the designs humanizes the brand to the public.
- Incorporate Influencer Marketing
A study in 2016 established that 94 percent of digital marketers confirm that influencer marketing is effective.
In fact, audiences have started to look at traditional marketing with more distrust. The term “ad blindness” was coined to describe the tendency of users to simply ignore the display advertisements on their social media profiles.
However, sponsored posts from niche influencers are like a seal of approval.
Audiences trust these posts more based on the image of the influencer. So when investing in this strategy, your key responsibility is to scope out influencers that have an image concurrent with your services.
Conclusion
Social media channels are immensely crowded with users who keep changing their priorities regarding what they do and do not like within their news feeds.
When competing against other brands on this quicksand of constant reevaluation, you need to constantly improve your own strategy. That is the only way to survive.
Fortunately, these 7 tips to increase social media engagement can be the blueprint to design your social media strategy.
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