Top Practices to Increase Engagement on Social Media

Social Media engagement is probably the most important factor in the success of your businesses social pages and amusingly the hardest to attain. Engagement can come in many ways, through likes, retweets, shares etc… Essentially engagement just means that the audience is responding to your content. Luckily for you, marketers have been trying to do this for ages and have discovered a number of ways to engage the audience.

Use #Hashtags

Hashtags are a beautiful thing on social media. They started on twitter as a way to find tweets using the same keywords; this is a great tool for social marketing as it allows your business to hop on to trends to gain exposure to large amounts of people who wouldn’t normally see your page. Hashtags are now used across Facebook, Instagram and Google+ as well as Twitter. Now you shouldn’t saturate your posts with hashtags as posts with over 2 hashtags tend to get less engagement.

Solve Customer Problems

After you gain a bit of a following with your customers they might start asking questions regarding the product/industry, staying on top of these small interactions is a great way to boost the authenticity of your brand and could encourage more people to start conversations with your business. Having genuine conversations with your audience can help how authentic you appear on social. This is important because your audience won’t engage with you if your content tries too hard or appears put on.

Check the timing of your posts

Using social media management software like Sprout Social or Hootsuite allows you to schedule posts to be published whenever you want. Posting at optimal times is something you should try and do as your target audience is likely to be more active at certain points of the day.

Hijack viral content

You should always try to stay on top of the latest viral trends as they can be used as tools for grabbing some free engagement. Reposting some viral content to your audience can give you a little boost as viral content gets shared around easily.

Create Content

If you’re not using any original content on your social media pages then your engagement is likely to stagnate. You should take the time to create good content tailored towards your target audience. There are so many options for creating content for social media, you can write blogs to inform and entertain the audience on your industry. You can create striking infographics that draw the audience in and are available to repost whenever. Some research has shown that images can increase the interaction by 85% on Facebook!
Following these steps can help your social out quite a bit. But if you find that your social is still not growing you could try advertising on social media by using sponsored and boosted posts, you could also hire a social media manager but that’s pretty expensive. For the best performance you should consider outsourcing your social media management to professionals.