Social Media engagement is tough to achieve yet can pay off in your company’s overall growth and sales. An engagement means that someone genuinely cares about your brand message and product, to the point that they want to interact with your business online.
Nearly 50% of the world’s population uses social media. Of those users, an average of 2.2 hours a day is spent on a social platform- that’s a ton of engagement opportunities for any brand. In this article, we’ll explore ten ways you can create natural engagement opportunities with your social media followers.
10 Tips for better social media engagement
1. Use people in your pictures
People relate to people. If you want to connect with your audience, try to use images or videos that include people, and especially faces. It’s an easy way to make someone be able to relate to your content better.
Try to steer away from “perfect” looking people. If you want someone to be able to connect with your brand, get rid of the filters and show relatable people in admirable situations.
If you’re a B2B SaaS company or you focus on a product that serves as a tool for other products, it can often be hard to incorporate people into your content strategy. If this is the case, try to focus on employee recognition. By bringing the people behind the scenes to the forefront of your content, you’ll seem more human and relatable- resulting in better engagement.
2. Create Quizzes
Quizzes are a unique way of building an engagement opportunity that is relevant to your brand. They have the power to create conversation, brand reach, and can even lead to acquisition opportunities.
If you can build a beautiful quiz that users enjoy, they’ll be more likely to interact with your brand in the future.
Building on this, people look forward to receiving their quiz results. If you’re looking to engage with your social media audience on other channels, then taking contact details is the perfect reason for you to follow up with an email or call. Let people know that’s how they can expect to hear their quiz results, and build engagement across the board.
3. Host Competitions
If you have a relatively low following on social media, then hosting a social media competition can be the perfect way to build engagement. Find a prize that’s relevant to your brand and is something that your followers would love.
You’ll also want to keep the competition with a relatively low barrier of entry. Something simple like, “follow our account, like this post, and tag two friends.” By doing this, you’ll maximize entries and provide your social competition with the biggest chance of success. What’s a KPI for success? High engagement.
4. Create interactive content
There are a few social media platforms that offer ways to display interactive content. Facebook and Instagram are undoubtedly the best for this. Facebook has a few options, 360 videos, 3D photos, and more.
Instagram, on the other hand, gives you story sticker features like questions, polls, and #challenges. Find ways to use these built-in features and incorporate them with your brand’s content plan on social media.
5. Feature others
This tactic is a relatively low lift and high reward. If you’re hoping to build engagement with certain people, then featuring their content can be a great way to get their attention. If you’re in a position to showcase their content and pay compliments to it within your posting, you can almost guarantee you’ll win an engagement from that person.
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Plus, if they publicly thank you for sharing their content, then your page could be pushed in front of the eyes of even more people.
6. Use a hashtag strategy
Every social media channel uses hashtags differently. What can we take away from that sentence? Every social media channel uses hashtags. If you don’t have a hashtag strategy, then it will drastically limit your reach and chances of engaging with people that don’t follow you.
Take time to brush up on how to use hashtags for different social media channels and incorporate a hashtag strategy into all of your future content. Done well, using the right hashtags at the right time can drastically increase your engagement.
7. Host conversations
Engagement is a two-way street. You can’t expect people to engage with your brand if you’re not doing the same back. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a B2B or a B2C company, you should be engaging with other accounts on social media as much as you expect people to engage with yours.
Share posts, comment on people’s work, and host conversations in comments. Once people see you’re making an effort to engage with them, they’ll do the same back to you.
8. Go live
Live is still highly valued by a lot of social media channels, and in going live, you’ll find yourself springing to the top of people’s newsfeeds even if they haven’t interacted with you in a while.
Plus, 82% of people prefer a brand’s live video over standard social media posts.
Both of the above factors give your brand the maximum opportunity to engage with a viewer if you’re airing the right content.
All being said, find a topic that’s engaging for your follower base and encourage viewers to comment their opinions throughout the live session.
9. Ask questions
A few questions can go a long way with the right audience. If you’re hoping to increase your engagement rates on social media, ask the right questions. Whether you do this through video content, question stickers, or in the copy of your posts- find questions that your followers would want to answer and get asking.
You can’t expect people to engage with your brand just because you’re posting beautiful content. Your content has to provoke a response, the best way to do that is to ask questions.
10. Lift stories
We’ll close with lifting stories. Social media is an incredible thing. It gives us access to people and businesses across the globe and provides us with the opportunity to hear and follow everyone’s story.
Use your channel to lift other people’s stories, stories that need to be heard within your community. By harnessing your platform’s reach to give someone else the mic, you’ll spark authentic engagement opportunities while showcasing a snippet from another brand or person’s perspective.
Do it well, be considerate and conscious of what you choose to post, and engage with your followers on a deeper level.
Wrapping up
That’s a wrap for building natural engagement using social media. I hope you’ve found this information useful and have discovered a few ideas you can start to use on your own social media channels.
Most of this information works for businesses as well as personal brands. Be sure to adapt it your own way, use high-quality content, and start utilizing social media to help your business grow.
Author Bio
Ray Slater Berry has been working in social media and content marketing for eight years. He specializes in the tech, innovation, and travel sectors. He is a writer for Typeform and is a published novelist with his first book, Golden Boy
