If you care about your brand, you must consider social media as an important engagement tool. Over the years, social media has become an essential communication channel for brands. Over 90% of digital marketers accepted social media marketing as integral to their digital marketing strategy. Most of them found social media marketing very effective for their respective brands.
How to Increase Social Media Engagement?
A good number of brands are using social media to promote their products and services. If you haven’t yet considered social media marketing as a key strategy, set your goals now. Your social media marketing strategy needs an overhaul if your audience isn’t engaged enough. If your social media marketing strategy is ill-prepared, your website will receive no or less engagement.
However, you will always have ways to improve your social media engagement strategy by following some simple tricks:
Don’t be over-promotional
First things first, social media platforms are built for hangouts and fun. It’s all about creating, publishing, and consuming awesome content. Blatant sales pitches could be detrimental in terms of user engagement.
Never post overly promotional content and invite people to buy. Instead, create witty content to entertain your followers and increase social media engagement. Use images, videos, and memes with enticing captions to introduce your service or product in a very distinguished manner.
Add Captivating Visuals
It’s a fact that Facebook posts with images and videos get more engagement than posts without visuals. Thus, if you want to improve social media engagement for your brand, post content having photos, memes, GIFs, or even original graphics.
You can utilize available photo editing or meme creator tools to create unique visuals that will engage your audience on social media platforms. Visuals created using shapes, photos, text, and colors may add more to your social media content. Infographics can be an innovative way to represent your content if you have posts containing interesting facts and useful points.
Create More Video Content
Original and innovative videos can hugely improve social media engagement on social media platforms. You can create videos for social media platforms in addition to regular posts. It will give your content a refreshing change.
Video content gets more traction than photos and receives more likes than any other content on average. Posting engaging videos on social media boosts social media engagement at scale. While publishing the video, optimize them well with the best keywords, titles, descriptions, and tags. It will help your videos rank well and get them discovered in search.
Create a Post Schedule
Your social media posts won’t get much attention if you publish them when most of your followers are inactive. It could hurt engagement opportunities. Scheduling your social media posts can help you avoid this situation.
Before publishing the post, find out the best times when your social media followers are most likely to be online. Once you’re done with it, you can schedule your posts accordingly. It will make sure that most of your followers see your posts and like, comment, and/or share the posts.
The right time to post your content on social media channels is based on several factors including time zone, target demographic, and social media channels being used. Thus, before final publishing, run a few tests to find which timing works best for you.
Statistics prove that posts published on Facebook between 1 PM and 4 PM drive more engagement. Similarly, Tweets tweeted around 12-3 PM during the week receive maximum traction.
Use Trending hashtags
Hashtags can increase social media engagement if you use them with a strategy. Hashtags can engage the audience that isn’t following you. It will be in addition to your existing followers who already have engaged with your social media content.
By using relevant and trending hashtags in your Instagram and Twitter posts, you can increase the chances of social media users finding your posts and other content on relevant platforms.
Several tools can help you in finding trending hashtags that you can use to increase your social media reach and engagement. These tools give you enough insights to generate hashtags based on the latest hashtag trends.
Host Giveaway Contests:
Offering free giveaways is always a great way to engage your social media users. Hosting giveaway contests drive engagement as people find it an opportunity to receive something for free.
You can leverage giveaways to produce user-generated content for your brand. For instance, you can offer free goodies to the users who post their photos with your product and a unique branded hashtag on social media.
You may request the audience to engage with the post and tag their friends to participate. You can also encourage them to share the post and request others to follow your brand or like your page. It will help you improve engagement and increase your social media following as well. There are plenty of tools available that you can utilize to plan, create, and execute a viral social campaign.
Conclusion
Discussed above are some of the most pertinent and effective ways to skyrocket social media engagement. If you haven’t yet implemented these tips, start applying them today. Audit your existing plan and create a new social media marketing strategy that is precise and well-calculated.
Tarun Gupta, CEO of Brainpulse Technologies, is a prolific author and digital marketing specialist. His insightful writings span SEO, content marketing, social media strategy, and email campaigns, offering invaluable expertise to businesses worldwide. Tarun’s contributions continue to shape the digital marketing landscape, guiding success in multiple niches.