4 guaranteed ways to boost engagement on social media

Crafting your master social media plan and perfecting all of the content is one thing - but receiving engagement on all of that hard work is another.

Most brands recognise that they want more engagements on their posts, but don’t know how to realign their old strategy to meet new objectives. Plus the minefield of algorithms on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and so on can make it hard to ensure post success.

But that doesn’t mean your engagement rate can’t improve! There is no max level of engagement rate, so it’s always something your brand can work on - no matter how big or small. When your audience is engaged, other people will start to see your posts too which only makes it more likely that you’ll achieve your social media goals.

To boost your engagement, you must first be able to answer the following questions:

• What is social engagement?
• What makes an engaging post?
• How do you tell when posts aren’t engaging?
• How can you boost engagement quickly?

What is social engagement

Social media engagement often involves some form of interaction between a brand and its audience. A variety of metrics are involved in social media engagement. Most of the more popular networks already have engagement analysis tools built in for free. But what’s most important is for you to understand and examine what your engagements mean.

If we take a closer look at Facebook, we can see that engagement is recognised as interacting with a Page’s posts or profile, plus any messages or mentions. You can easily identify a trend by looking at your engagement rate between months. But you’ll definitely want to examine other metrics to gather a deeper understanding of your engagement and identify where you can improve.

Keeping with Facebook, we can see that engagement is divided up into the following areas:

• Page interaction: call-to-action button clicks, tab clicks and profile clicks
• Post interaction: Comments, likes and shares
• Direct message interaction: messaging a Page or responding to a message
• Other Page interaction: Page mentions and comments on other Page’s posts

These engagement areas aren’t conclusive, but it can give you a good idea as to where to start when looking to improve your engagement.

1. Analyse your engagement

To improve your engagement, you’ve got to analyse it first. Like we’ve already learnt, most popular social media platforms already have helpful analysis tools built in - for free. If you’re not sure what to look out for, you always have the option of enlisting the help of an expert to help you summarise the information.

But what do you need to analyse? Let’s take an example. If you see your post engagements dropping over several weeks, then your content may need to rethink it to tailor to your audience’s interests (make sure you take any paid promotions into account). If you see that a post has a huge engagement rate compared to others, make a note of what made it stand out. All of this can help you to identify what type of content most appeals to your audience and boosts engagement.

2. Set your goals

Setting definitive goals can help you focus your content efforts. If you’re looking to boost engagement, you’ll want to look at creating more interesting content. This then helps to tell you what metrics to look out for - yours will now be specifically measuring engagement. Try to look at how many people are interacting with your posts and what type of engagement is taking place.

3. Making an engaging post

Each social media platform favours different types of content over others in terms of an engaging posts - but the baseline is the same amongst all.

According to a recent survey by Sprout, 68% of people are most engaged by an image on social media. Second favourite is videos with 50% of consumers wanting to see more of this type of content. See the full breakdown below:

1. Images - 68%
2. Videos - 50%
3. Text-based - 30%
4. Stories - 26%
5. Polls - 26%
6. Live video - 22%
7. GIFs - 17%
8. URLS/Link to brand content - 16%
9. Q&As - 11%
10. UGC - 10%

To see what works best for your brand, make sure you check out your own analytics and post breakdowns. Don’t know where to start? Just get in touch and we’ll help you get started.

4. Set your plans in motion

The hardest place is getting started. Now it’s time to execute your strategy ideas. But, what are your ideas? To help with the thought process, we’ve listed some short and long-term ideas to assist in your content strategy.

• Giveaways

These can be a really quick way to boost engagement - plus who doesn’t love free stuff?! Even better, by making the content engagement-focused, it can help you to hit those KPIs and goals.

Giveaways can take place on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or even across platforms. You can ask for specific entry requirements, including follows and comments, for increased engagement. One of our favourite types of entry requirements for a giveaway is to ask a question with no specific answer. This way you can guarantee your audience is genuinely engaging with your post.

Don’t have anything to giveaway? The prize doesn’t always have to be physical, you can offer a service that your business provides instead - think outside the box.

• Try humour

If it’s something that’s appropriate for your audience, try getting funny with your content. Nearly 3 in 4 social media users want brands to be funny, friendly and honest.

Whether it’s behind-the-scenes bloopers in the office, or creating a meme from your own products or services - remember not to take yourself too seriously.

• Team up

Collaborations on social media can make for some really interesting content. Whether it’s an influencer in your field, or even a competitor, the boost in engagement and follows could work out well for you both.

Try reaching out to other like-minded brands and pitch some ideas for fun and interesting content that will work for both your audiences.

Increasing social media engagement has to be broken down into easy steps in order to be done successfully. Understanding and analysing your current engagement helps you to understand what’s currently working, and what your audience isn’t interested in. Then, creating and managing a social media plan that includes both short-term and long-term strategies to boost engagement.

If you have no idea where to start and need some help with planning and executing your engaging social media content plan - get in touch with us for a FREE quote or social media advice for your brand.