5 Tips to Increase Engagement on Social Media

If one of your goals is to increase the engagement on your social media platforms then you are not alone.  This is one of the top discussions I have on a regular basis with clients.  It is wonderful if your social media accounts have lots of followers and are reaching thousands of people.  But if those users are not engaging with your business or your content, then you are missing out on the real goal of being “social” on social media.

What Does Social Media Engagement Mean?

Social media engagement is anytime that a social media platform user interacts with your content or page.  This might be in the form of a like, a comment, or a share.  It also might be when another user or page mentions or tags your page using the @symbol or when they leave a review or share a post to your page.

What is Considered a Good Rate of Social Media Engagement?

In general anything over 3% is considered to be great social media engagement.  This means that out of everyone that saw your content which is usually measured in terms of “reach” or “impressions” that 3% took some form of action.

Why Should I Be Concerned with Social Media Engagement?

Having a truly engaged audience and being engaging yourself can grow your accounts even faster and have more benefit to your business as you will gain more leads and more customers from those that engage with you.  

Social Media is really about relationship marketing.  Building meaningful relationships with your social media audience on a consistent basis is going to help grow your reach, build more engagement and in the end grow your business.

So let’s discuss some tips that you can use to help build relationships on social media that can help you increase your engagement.

Tip #1:  Be Human

People connect with people.  The more human you can make your content the more engagement you are going to get on social media.  Show the real and authentic side of you, your team, and your business.  Some ideas include:

• Feature a team member i.e. wish them a happy birthday, or work anniversary
• Feature a team members pet (we all love animals!)
• Share a behind the scenes photo or video of your workplace or office 

The more you include emotion in your social media the more you will connect on a human level with your audience.

Tip #2:  Engage

In order to get engagement, you need to also engage.  More engagement = more engagement.  This means that YOU need to interact with others on social media (as your business page and accounts) in order to build more engagement yourself.

Like, comment and share other posts from your business page and accounts.  Participate in Facebook Groups as your business, participate in Twitter Chats, Instagram Loops etc.  The more active you are, trust me, the more active others will be with you.  

Spend a few minutes each day on your own engagement and you will see immediate results with people interacting with your accounts.  

Quick Tip:  Make sure you respond to ALL comments!  This will allow you that extra touch point with each person that took the time to comment on your post, and it is amazing for the algorithms.

Tip #3:  Collaborate

Collaboration is any activity where two or more similar people, businesses or organizations come together to share information and help each other.

An example of collaborating online might include sharing a guest blog post, or being a guest on a podcast.  Might also include featuring another local business or product.

When you collaborate the key to increasing engagement is to make sure that both parties tag the other on social media and share the content across all platforms.  

There are so many benefits to collaborating that include increased engagement, increased reputation, but also can be a huge benefit for search engine optimization SEO and more.

Collaboration is an amazing tool to increase engagement on not just your social media platforms but of those of the person or business you collaborate with.  It is a Win/ Win strategy to include in your digital marketing plan.

Quick tip: TAG other social media accounts using the @ symbol

Tip#4 Be Consistent

This is the key.  Post and engage consistently to all of your social media platforms and over time you will experience growth in your audience, growth in your reach, growth in your engagement and ultimately growth in your business or organization.

Set out to post a consistent number of times per week to your social media accounts.  Even if it is just 3 times per week.  In addition to just pushing out content, set aside time in your calendar (or delegate) for social media engagement where you are monitoring and responding to everyone that has engaged with your posts and you are engaging with others.  Doing this daily is ideal, but if that is too much at least a few times a week will be better than nothing.

The worst social media strategy is to post inconsistently and ignoring your engagements.

Tip#5 Share Engaging Content

When you are creating your social media content try to include a mixture of posts that are meant to generate engagement.  **Pro Tip - don’t post sales posts more than 30% of the time!**

Examples of content that might encourage discussion include:

• Ask questions
• Do a Poll
• Share a giveaway
• Ask a “this or that” 
• Share a thought provoking article

You can find more examples of Questions to Ask in Social Media Content here

I hope you found these tips helpful, it is a pleasure to be able to offer assistance to business owners and bloggers and organizations to help them experience success with digital marketing.  Please comment below if you have some ideas or experience with other ways you have been able to generate good engagement on social media!

If you are looking for assistance in social media marketing or social media management please reach out to the team at Dufferin Media. We offer a fully hands off solution for social media marketing.