Success on social media isn’t just about growing your following. Posting and ghosting your audience doesn’t get you what you really want – engagement. True engagement requires a proactive approach. Managing engagement and communication with your followers helps convert users and followers into advocates for your brand and possibly – customers.
Defining social media engagement
Social media engagement is a measure of how your audience is interacting with your social media content. Usually, this is shown as a percentage of total views. This is returned as an ‘engagement rate’. Some of the metrics that social media managers use are:
- consents
- REVIEWS
- Followers
- Shares
- Retweet
- The clicks
- Direct messages
- Prefered
Having a large following doesn’t do you any good if they aren’t paying attention. If you have a lot of followers, but they aren’t engaging in other ways – it’s time to change your content strategy. Vanity metrics look great, but what you really want is what helps your business.
Increased engagement on social media
Now that you know what engagement is – let’s talk about how to increase engagement on your social media channels.
Understand your platforms
It is important to understand the purpose of each channel, who is likely to be on that channel and how they best consume their content. “Create once, post anywhere” used to be the norm, but audiences aren’t falling for it anymore.
Tips for engaging across platforms
- Know your audience – Know who consumes your content, where they are and what is important to them. Review the content you post and see which ones get the most engagement – do more that. Advanced Instagram analytics can help you get the insights you need to improve your content plan.
- Go to trending conversations – Comment on trending events like award shows or other news topics. A word of caution – talk to team members and get some additional feedback on anything that might be controversial before you get into a PR mess.
- Practice active audience interaction – Like or reply to comments. The key is to be on-brand and authentic. Generic comments like “this is awesome!” it won’t work as well over time. The algorithm will know you’re just calling it.
Tips for Instagram Engagement
- According to a 2021 study by Social Insider and Sked Social, Carousel posts consistently have the highest engagement rate on Instagram. Use carousels to promote products, tell a story or share testimonials with your audience
- Use Instagram’s recent shift to focus on video content through Reels to increase your engagement. The algorithm has been encouraging the use of video content on Reels and rewarding users who post this type of content. Leverage these high engagement levels by making videos with Reels audios and trending formats which you can find in the Scrolls tab.
- Add Instagram stories to ask questions, polls and use attach the stickers to the machine engagement
Tips for TikTok engagement
- TikTok’s engagement algorithm rewards users for using trending sounds. For better or worse, jumping on trends increases your reach
- Use series to gain followers who want to see the rest of the series. Keep these uniforms – the same background and format
Tips for Facebook Engagement
- Facebook skews ‘older’ – as in, millennials and above, mostly. Change your messages, images and content to address these users
- Use Facebook Live. Make it a regular ‘show’ that users can look forward to. On average, live videos bring more than double the number of comments per video than standard Facebook video posts.
- Facebook groups are still a great place to gain engagement and also start monetizing an audience. Creating a branded Facebook group can be a great way to increase engagement and drive people to your other social media platforms and pages.
Tips for Twitter Engagement
- Use pop culture and memes to jump into the latest conversations. Twitter’s reach of 330 million monthly users can significantly increase your brand awareness
- Use GIFs. A study of 3.7 million Tweets showed that GIFs were taken 55% higher engagement rates than those without.
LinkedIn engagement tips
- Keep your business profile up to date and on brand.
- Submit employee and customer testimonials. Using real people creates a human element.
- Use the poll feature. The survey and the results from your survey provide a chance for engagement during and after the survey.
Now what?
Now that you’re a social media engagement insider, you can start using these tips right away. Create your content in batches, then schedule your posts with Sked Social. You’ll never miss a post or a chance to engage with your audience. Sked even gives you performance metrics and analytics to benchmark and track your goals. Try Sked Social for free for 7 days and level up your social media engagement game.
