Your brand's audience wants to connect with you, so show them you want to do the same by taking steps to increase social media engagement. It's not nearly as difficult as you might think and the returns are incredible.
The good news is you don't even have to spend much. Social media is a budget-friendly way to increase brand awareness, improve your brand's reputation and build lasting relationships with your customers.
1. Have Some Fun
While 90% of marketers say social media has helped their brand, 51% of people said they'd unfollow brands that post annoying or bad content. This means you need to post content your audience will enjoy, such as something fun and light.
Post relevant funny memes, jokes, videos and so on. Not only do people love these, but they're more likely to share them too.
Implement sticky elements
Sticky elements are becoming a widely utilized strategy for increasing social media engagement considering the flexibility that you get while displaying information on your site. The edge that they bring is that you can easily set up sticky social media buttons that will "follow" the user as he scrolls and with that, keep those buttons within clicking range. By utilizing a plugin like WP Sticky, you can easily make sticky social media buttons, as well as a sticky header, sticky menu, sidebar, widget, video, or any other section of your website. The best part is that it doesn't require any coding since everything is picked right off the screen and the entire procedure can be done within minutes.
2. Share Content From Others
Increase social media engagement simply by sharing posts from others. Your social media strategy shouldn't be solely marketing. Give your audience more by sharing useful content from others that can help them. That makes them more loyal to you.
3. Ask Them Questions
You want to know more about your audience and they love to share their thoughts and opinions. One of the easiest social media engagement strategies is to simply ask questions. Asking for feedbacks is an important element of engaging with your audience, and there are a lot of other business benefits of surveying your customers. These could be about feedback on products, general preferences, fun themed questions (such as holidays) and so on. Don't forget to reply and engage with some of the comments.
You can also ask for feedback on social media and allow your customers to communicate with you. Even bad feedback, when resolved properly and gracefully, on a social platform garners a lot of attention and increases customer loyalty. You can use a Feedback App to run these surveys and get real-time reports to improve your business.
4. Create Useful Content
Simply posting products, promotions and news isn't going to increase engagement. While it's a good idea to post about promotions, the majority of your social media posts should be useful content, including tutorials, videos, life tips, and more that relate back to your brand in some way. Incorporating strategic project scheduling can help ensure a consistent and diverse content calendar to maintain audience interest and boost engagement.
5. Aggregate Content On Your Site
Increasing social media engagement can be as simple as gathering all your social media channels on your website. Now, your audience can interact with you from a single source. Plus, you can use a social media aggregator tool like Curator to pull in relevant hashtags and mentions to further increase engagement.
6. Interact With Your Audience
Posting and done won't help your brand at all. It's a common mistake, but it's worth spending the extra time interacting with your audience. You don't have to respond to all comments and mentions, but pay close attention to complaints, suggestions and questions. Responding in a timely manner shows your audience you care, which helps increase overall engagement.
Take charge of social media engagement for your brand. Stay active on social media and consider Curator to aggregate your accounts in one place.
Image: Sara Kurfess