Key Takeaways:
- Social Media Engagement is a measure of the digital conversation between you and your audience.
- It is the most efficient way to analyze how your content is working.
- Social media engagement can be improved by asking questions and expressing yourself authentically along with incentives to deliver value for your audience.
- All it requires is to apply basic thought process of what you want to deliver with a tact.
Without engagement, social media is just like any other media! Social media comes with a plethora of opportunities to interact with your audience. It is not just about being popular on social media but also building connections with an existing and future audience through Social Media Engagement that will help to boost your brand. What started as a platform to hang out with their friends online has now turned into a space where brands/personalities can engage in meaningful conversations and turn them into followers and customers. Big giant platforms for social media like – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram are growing rapidly. [Link to social media post – https://www.instagram.com/p/CONbSkRnX-h/?igshid=m49anbdd0a7d ]
Start-ups and small businesses have seen a major impact through Social Media Engagement affecting everything from brand awareness to customer loyalty by putting the right social media strategy into action. In simple terms, social media engagement measures how engaged is your audience with the content. It assesses how your content is perceived by your audience based on their interest in and reactions to what you share. In simple terms, social media engagement refers to the measurement of likes, comments, and shares.
However, Social Media Engagement is like a two-way street. It creates brand loyalty and starts a conversation with your customers and followers. A personalized Social Media Strategy will create stronger connections between your business and the audience which exemplifies your commitment to customer service.
Engagement is a great way to measure whether the content that you are creating does resonate with the audience the correct social media strategy but that’s not all it’s good for, which brings us to the point that why is social media engagement so important?
Importance of Social Media Engagement
Interacting with people indicates a greater sense of well-being. On the other hand, just scrolling through your Instagram feed, passively reading or watching without interacting with others, tends to make them feel worse and uninterested in your content. Though your followers expect you to engage so that they feel lively and connected. It is crucial to apply a social media strategy that makes them feel valued as a result to increase social media engagement.
If someone visits your page for the first time and sees few likes and no comments, they may lose interest. If they see a decent number of likes, enthusiastic comments, and helpful responses on the page, they are more likely to stay on the page, be a loyal follower of your social accounts, and hopefully convert into a customer in case of brands.
Social media engagement can also build potential relationships. Your audience is the best teacher and probably the inspiration for your content. One of the most unique parts of social media strategy is to use social media to learn from our customers and community as to how can we improve their experience.
Content that is engaging for its audience can get the help you generate new leads, nurture the existing ones, create a loyal audience as your followers/customers, and generate sales even. In this era, an average user spends approximately 2 hours and 30 minutes on social media platforms daily. Thus, social media engagement is essential for businesses to stay in touch with old customers and find new ones.
Social Media Engagement Matrices
Now that we understand the importance of social media engagement, it is important to know how can we measure engagement. Every social media platform has unique matrices to measure its engagement along with followers:
- Facebook – Likes, comments, shares, impressions, reactions, and followers
- Instagram – Likes, comments, views, reach, saves, and followers
- Twitter – Retweets, likes, replies, hashtags, and followers
- LinkedIn – Comments, shares, views, and followers
Shares, likes, reactions, retweets, hashtags, and comments tell us about the popularity of a given post. No. of saves indicate what type of content and genre is working and appreciated by the audience. An increase in followers means that your followers want to see your content more regularly. Thus, followers are a source of lead generation similar to getting a visitor to sign up for an e-mail list.
Though posts can be shared for a couple of reasons, however, not all of them are good. Going viral over a poorly-thought-out post can have aversive reactions and leads to the bad publicity that proves to be unshakeable. Poor social media engagement strategy makes an unappealing impression on your audience making them feel dissatisfied or disinterested in your brand. On the contrary, social media engagement is only as positive as the reputation it generates. A good social media engagement strategy helps you in growing your image and as a brand/business.
Social Media Engagement Rate
You cannot buy engagement – You need to build engagement! Social media engagement rate is a metric that measures how many people interacted with the social media post v/s how many people saw the post. According to experts, engagement rates differ with the social media platforms along with their followers. Good engagement rate on average is:
- Facebook – 0.27%
- Instagram – 3%
- Twitter – 0.5% – 1%
- LinkedIn – 2%
You can track your engagement in the “Insights” section of your profile. Insights help you understand which posts are getting more engagement, reach, and impression. This will help you derive a conclusion to what type of content works for you, what is the best time to post, what day of the week receives maximum traction, what post-genre works etc. While engagement rate can be calculated by various formulas applicable for a particular social media platform from https://phlanx.com/engagement-calculator
To boost your engagement, you need your social media strategy to be implemented with the correct approach. Social media strategy refers to a plan of action that we put together by strategically posting interactive content on your profile. Preparing social media engagement strategy is a framework that involves a step-by-step process:
- Figuring out what value you can add to your audience or what are you good at.
- Identify your goal for social media engagement.
- Based on similar lines what type of genre does your audience likes to see often on your page.
- Ideating unique suitable content ideas and their mode of execution.
- Scheduling your posts while maintaining your aesthetics in the feed.
Your content should provide them a reason to come back to your page. Two major problems that everyone faces are – identifying the correct strategy and suitable buzz-worthy content ideas to catch engagement.
5 Powerful Social Media Engaging Strategies
Just how the 5 vowels are important in the English alphabet series, using the same concept and acronym we used in school is the solution to the problem i.e. “AEIOU ENGAGEMENT MODEL” which includes 5 Powerful Social Media Engaging Strategies that will bring in better engagement:
1. A is for ASK:
The best way to engage with your target audience is to ask them questions. People like to think about things they are questioned about especially on social media. They feel special because it gives them a feeling that their opinion matters. They like to hear from other thinkers.
Some of the strategies to prompt your audience about “What do you think?” are:
- A/B Testing – Though A/B testing is used for technical purposes, it is a powerful strategy to gain engagement. You can make 2 different variants for a task and check which one gives better results. Ask the audience to review both and pick the one that the audience likes the most for further content creation.
- Play “Test your knowledge game” – It is irresistible for people to not participate. You can put a quiz on your profile in a story format that is easily accessible to any social media platform. The topic of the quiz can be based on your specialization or niche interest.
- Probe their personality – You can post a question invites people to invite people to share their opinion on something of their interest. This is a great learning opportunity to understand what your target audience thinks based on the responses received. These responses will be the source of inspiration for your future content creation.
- Post a poll – It is very easy to create a poll on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. In addition to engaging with your followers, you also learn meaningful things about them. You get to know what are their likes, dislikes, choices, and preferences on a particular thing.
- Ask straight – To create some engaging and thought-provoking activity on social media you just simply post a question. This directly generates traction and creates buzz-worthy content.
2. E is for EXPRESSIONS:
Expression is a way to present yourself. Social media has now collided making the smartphone your personal experience machine. It doesn’t matter how we create content using the best equipment but social media platforms enable the audience to express themselves in whichever way they want. It is the best social media strategy that provokes social media engagement through your audience to create content for you and hence promote you subtly. Here are few ideas about how can you execute it:
- Action with HASHion – Hashtag has become the ticket to connect with like-minded people. Hashtag research is just before you put out any post or hash out a unique phrase that reflects your brand. Hit that # key and select relevant hashtags to invite your followers to jump in the relevant content. Hashtags must be short, crisp, and match your tonality.
- Introduce YOU – Tell your audience about yourself, what are you good at, what are your achievements, etc. This makes the audience feel connected and human.
- Voice others – Showing your customers, partners, employees engage the audience where they understand what is going behind the scenes. Giving them a voice of opinion about the brand makes a huge difference in making branded content.
- Go LIVE – You can go live and interact with your audience. They can express themselves, solve their queries, answer FAQs, etc. Going live through your account helps in building relationships with your followers, engaging with your audience, and most importantly understanding them.
3. I is for INCENTIVE:
Incentives work as timely conditioning for your audience. People always like to play games, compete with each other, and at the top of all WIN, especially on social media. Thus, you can satisfy this competitive spirit by giving incentives to them. Some ideas that help you get social media engagement in terms of incentivizing them are:
- Announce media upload contest – Many social media fans love engaging in social media contests especially on Instagram and Facebook that involve sharing of media – photos/videos. Contests can also curate other forms of self-expression like – recipes, recordings, illustrations, poems, essays, etc. based on your topic and theme selected.
- Giveaway alert – Offering an attractive giveaway alert is a super engaging social media strategy based on feasibility. The giveaway is like a social barter system, where you make the audience achieve your goal and in return, you reimburse them with giveaways.
- Feature them – Everyone likes the when the notification comes like “Mentioned you in …”. Not every time you can do giveaways, but simply featuring some of the selected audience can drastically increase your engagement rate because the people you are featuring are also watching your posts now. Thus, you now have a larger audience to cater to.
4. O is for ORIGINAL:
Original content is the only content that can sustain itself in the long run. Build your content and posts around your expertise and grow it along. Original content is always the trendsetter and the most reliable source for social media engagement because plagiarism is even difficult to do on social media. There are high chances of you getting trolled if your content is copied. It is important to plan your content and strategically post it on social media. Some of the ways to form original content ideas are:
- Mood board – Prepare your mood board which includes an arena of adjectives that define you or you are popular. You can take help from your colleagues, friends, and family undertaking their opinions. Now you have content buckets ready to dig into. Build around these content buckets by preparing a content planner for you.
- Be the trendsetter – Knowing what’s trending and creatively adding your inputs can make you the trendsetter.
- Testimonials – Share your work done with the audience. This is a great way to build trust among your audience.
- Relatable content – The post will get maximum engagement if the audience can relate it to their lives. The ideas for deriving relatable content are hidden in your daily routine. Once you figure it out, you can tweak it according to your expertise and specialization. One of the best ways to put relatable content is using memes for social media engagement if that matches your tonality.
5. U is for UTILITY:
The utility is all about providing useful and valuable content to your audience. Utility and engagement are best friends. This means the more utility you provide, the more social media engagement you receive. The aim is to educate the audience and gain engagement. We need ideas to consistently provide utility in our social media strategy. Some of the ways are:
- Tips & tricks – Post some quick tips about how can you do things in a better way based on your specialization.
- Bust myths – Bust myths in the industry you associate with the most are a good way to keep your audience engaged.
- Start episodic series – Sharing your knowledge will not grow you but add value to others. These episodes can be from 2-10 mins weekly/monthly depending on your resources. Episodes will help you divide your knowledge into chunks and choose the topics accordingly. It keeps the audience engaging because they are x
- Share updates about the industry – Sharing what’s new about the industry engages the niche audience particularly. It is a way to keep your audience updated and well known with current facts.
Other social media hygiene and engagement ideas that act as fillers for the AEIOU social media engagement strategy model is:
- Post-BTS (Behind the Scenes)
- Celebrate social media days (as per applicability)
- Follow a personalized pattern of feed
- Choose 2-4 colours and revolve around them in your posts
- Maintain story highlights as your content buckets
- Have a crisp quirky bio as your introduction
- Share fun facts about you
Thus, it is easy to gain social media engagement provided you apply your basics with a tact supplemented by strategy and a clear thought process of what you want to deliver to your audience. Like any other metrics, social media engagement alone should not be viewed in a vacuum. To effectively balance engagement with appropriate social media strategy, analytics, and content marketing requires an understanding of its algorithms. It differs across social media platforms according to its features. However, successful social media engagement requires careful and conscious effort.
To learn more such useful content and strategies click here.
Khyati Henia
Content Writer
Tanmay Sathe
Graphic Designer
Parth Panchal
Editor
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