5 strategies to increase user engagement in social media
As much as 70% of the adult population regularly uses social media. This fact is difficult to ignore not only for large companies but also for small brands. People are actively using social networks, which gives the company a great opportunity to increase brand awareness and increase sales.
However, just being on social media isn’t enough – to get results you also need to find a way to get your followers interested in your posts and your brand. But how can you improve your interaction on social networks when they’re already overloaded with a wide variety of information? In fact, it is a solvable problem. Here are 5 ways to engage your audience.
Analyze your current position on social media
As always, before you start acting anything, you first need to do some research and carefully analyze your current situation. Look at the number of subscribers, see how many likes, reposts, comments you have. However, an even more effective tool is to conduct a survey. This way, you’ll know two things right away: how many active subscribers you have who are ready to interact with your brand, and the real problems and wishes of your audience. So where to start the engagement analysis? The first step is to figure out which metrics to focus on. Some of the most important metrics for engagement are obvious: likes, shares, and comments. But that’s just a tip.
Take a look at subscriber dynamics as well as likes and other metrics. If you’ve had the same number of subscribers for a long time, things are not good as this is an indicator of disinterest. This means that your posts won’t reach a large number of people who could be reached if your posts were really interesting. Finally, you need to find out what your lead generation performance looks like. You don’t have to entertain people, you have to do business with them. So it’s important to find out which networks and even which posts are generating the most sales.
Control your publication schedule
Publishing times are usually not the first thing they pay attention to. However, if your message is published at two in the morning, it will hardly attract the attention of recipients by morning – even taking into account the specifics of the industry or time zones abroad. Therefore, first you need to check what time your audience is most active on the network. Only then should you focus on a specific time. But how do you get your posts published in a timely manner? First, you need to prepare your message in advance. Second, you have to either manually publish it when the time is right or use deferred publishing tools.
Create valuable content
Timely publishing is important. In fact, in many cases it will be the decisive factor in your success. But publication time will only matter if you make the posts attractive and interesting yourself. When people sit on social networks, mountains of diverse content fall on them. Therefore, you will have to compete with all these cat videos and photos and other interesting things for your audience. First you need to take into account the features of each of the social networks. The length of the films, the design, and even the humor in each will be different. So is the average age of viewers. It is important to understand the concerns and wishes of your audience. Schoolchildren seek different content, students seek different content, and something completely different is required to attract adults. Finally, consider how to make your posts stand out from the crowd. Building a recognizable brand will help you get more attention and people will start following you.
Chat with your followers
Interacting with social media requires that not only people write to you, but that you also respond and communicate fully with them. One of the main benefits of social media is the ability to get closer to your audience and exchange ideas instantly. Therefore, businesses need to remove any barriers that might give the impression that your posts are nothing more than clichéd ads.
Don’t limit yourself to just your own pages. You can set an alert to quickly find out when your brand is mentioned in other social media conversations. Thanks to this, you will quickly find an active message and take part in it or put out the fire before half of the internet starts talking about your brand negatively.
If you want to really increase your involvement, you can even organize streams where you or a representative of your company will answer questions from everyone on the air. This way, you will get a lot of feedback from your customers.
Use more visualizations
Long sheets of text, even on websites, make a depressing impression. When it comes to social media, overuse of text inevitably leads to failure. If you need to convey a series of numbers, do so with the help of an infographic. In this way, you will clearly convey all the necessary information to your recipients.
Experiment with style too. When a company sticks to one style, e.g. text, it looks more solid and gives more credibility. However, posting regular videos will also help you stand out, especially if those videos are useful and interesting. Finally, if you still need to convey information in text form, consider using emoticons. This will enliven the text and evoke emotions. But of course, do it carefully, if you offer bank loans, using emoticons can damage your image.
Conclusion
Increasing your social media engagement can be one of the easiest, cheapest and most effective ways to increase sales and build your brand. Applying the strategies above will put you in a much better position to organically grow your audience in the years to come.