Ask any of your friends or family and they probably have some kind of social media account whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Snapchat, or all of the above. In fact you wouldn’t even have to ask because you’d already know, they’ll be on your friends list.
It makes sense that so many businesses have taken to social media because it’s a great communication tool and improves your network. It’s easy to get caught up on how many likes you get on your page or on a post, which is important to an extent, but engagement through connecting with your audience is what keeps existing followers loyal and can also help attract new fans.
Tips for Increasing Engagement
Connecting with your audience can be tricky, but it’s nice to know that there are things you can do and things to avoid when trying to achieve this. For the most part, you can increase your engagement by ensuring optimal visibility of your posts.
Here are 11 tips to Increase Engagement:
- Share your social media information as much as you can. No one will know to follow your page if they don’t know it exists. Have this information displayed on your website, business cards, email signatures etc. Anywhere that you give out details about your business.
- People are very visual and lazy. True story. The use of pictures and videos are more likely to grab someone’s attention, which is important when they’re scrolling through an endless sea of selfies and ads targeting them based on their internet activity.
- Use Insights to see what types of posts your followers interact with. By referring to the information about the time of day and which days you have the most followers online, you can time your posts to reach more of them. If your followers often like, comment on, and share your content, they will see more of your future content. The more that your followers interact with you, the more visibility your posts will have on their newsfeeds.
- Post on a frequent basis but be sure not to over-post. You want to stay on your follower’s radar without clogging up their newsfeeds. You could lose followers if you’re annoying. Keep in mind that your posts reach on average 16% of your followers, post frequency is important for building your reach.
- Reference a trending topic and be timely. Everyone likes to be kept up to date with current events and it will show that you’re in the loop and never miss a beat.
- Share relevant information that you care about. If you don’t care about what you’re posting, chances are no one else will. If your posts are being frequently hidden or reported, this is a sign that your posts are of low quality and the visibility of your future posts will decrease.
- Use hashtags for your promotions or competitions. Hashtags make your content discoverable so people who aren’t necessarily following you could stumble on your post based on what you’re referencing. For this reason, the simpler you make the hashtag, the more likely people are to find them naturally. Keep them short, don’t use too many and tailor them to the network you’re using. Twitter uses hashtags to follow trending topics and conversations whereas Instagram uses them mainly as descriptions or references to images. Although Facebook doesn’t allow searches by hashtags, you could use Facebook to advertise a hashtag for use on another network.
- It’s a simple truth, but if you engage with your followers when they comment or post on your wall with ‘likes’ and comments on their posts then they’re more likely to engage with you, too. Have timely responses and be personable.
- Tag people or other pages. The people or pages that are tagged are likely to interact with you since you’ve personally engaged them. In turn, their friends are likely to engage with your post because it includes your mutual friend. Tagging opens you up to thousands of people who aren’t in your network yet.
- Don’t constantly Like-bait. Including words “like, comment, or share” in all your posts is a sign of poor quality. With the Facebook algorithm updates in 2014 to reduce spammy stories for their users newsfeeds, doing this too often can decrease the visibility of your posts
- Promote your content! Facebook posts from pages only reach between 2% and 6% of their fans organically (at January 2015). By promoting your content you increase the reach of your posts and have the opportunity to introduce your brand to audiences who don’t follow your brand already.
Social Media Engagement in Action
One of NOUS’s posts that received the most engagement was when we spread the news that Brian was promoted to Director of Digital. The use of the word ‘Congratulations’ in the comments by our followers acted as a trigger on Facebook, which deemed the post as an important event, which increased the visibility of our post. Since we also tagged multiple staff members in the photo, this opened up the post to be seen by their own personal networks. Because of this, people who aren’t even following the NOUS page were interacting with the post.
Doing It Yourself
Every business is different so it’s a matter of finding what works for you, testing the posts you make with times of day, keeping your company brand and voice in mind and tracking the results so you can see what resonates with your followers.
By following these tips and taking the time to experiment with your posts, you will in time get into the flow of what works for your company.
