How to improve your social media engagement

Improving your social media engagement could help you reach a bigger audience, which in turn positively impacts brand awareness, demand creation and warm leads. 

Engagement rate tracks how much an audience is actively engaged with content. On social media, this includes interactions such as comments, likes, shares, and mentions. For websites, its clicks, time spent on your page, or downloads. There are far more metrics you COULD track, however - my recommendation is to start simple. 

Before you start working on ways to improve your social media engagement, it’s important to analyze your current engagement to establish a baseline. 

With over 4.62 billion people using various channels for an average of 2 hours and 27 minutes each day, there’s a lot of engagement to measure! 

There are a few different ways you can go about measuring engagement:

• You can use traditional formulas.

• You can use softwares such as hootsuite, google analytics, sprout, etc.

• You can check the insights on your social media channels.

Take note of the content that had a higher engagement rate over the rest as this will help you identify what to focus on going forward. You can do the same for the ones that performed poorly.

Once you’ve established the baseline metrics, you’re ready to implement ways to increase your social media engagement. 

1. Post quality content - Don’t just post to post. Is your content captivating, engaging, relevant, and valuable to your audience? 

2. Reply to your audience - Don’t just post your content and leave it. That’s only half the job. Make sure you’re replying to comments and questions. Engage in conversation and start a dialogue to build trust around your brand. This will also encourage your audience to comment and connect in the future. 

3. Ask questions - Asking questions is directly asking your audience to engage. You can have a question on the actual content image or in the caption. Make sure you stick to brand or industry related questions to encourage the audience to view your company as an industry voice. Go above and beyond and ask open-ended questions that will generate more dialogue compared to true/false. 

4. Post at least 2x/week to each platform - Two times a week is a good starting point and then you can monitor the results. This creates awareness around your brand, without flooding your audience’s newsfeed. 

5. Post videos - Videos help you showcase the human side of your business. It also can help establish your brand as an expert in the field.

6. Utilize your call to actions - Encourage your audience to like, comment, and share by offering incentives, sneak peeks, and value adds. 

7. Interact with other people’s content - Set aside 15 minutes each day to go through your followers and prospects. This builds awareness and hopefully prompts them to engage in your content as well (theory of reciprocity). Engagement isn’t a one-way street. You need to be social.

8. Track Your Performance - Just like you did at the start, it’s important to continue to analyze your engagement going forward. When are the best days/times to post? What type of content is your audience responding to?  What are they not responding to?

Rinse and repeat. 

Be authentic! Your audience values honesty over anything else. Stay true to your brand, your core values, and your mission. 

Building trust with your audience will increase your engagement. This won’t happen overnight but stick to it and you should slowly start to see RESULTS (3 months minimum)!