Social media engagement is like a health-check for your social media page. If your social media pages have less than healthy engagement levels, they’re not likely to return a respectable ROI. However, creating social media engagement is hard. Even brands that have exceptionally huge followings (40k-50k) sometimes see meager activity on their posts (4-5 likes/shares).
So what really incites audience engagement? The following is a checklist of 10 tricks and tools that answer that question.
1. Consistent and frequent posting
Frequent and regular posting is essential for social media success. Proof of this statement is State Bicycle Co.’s Facebook page. By posting over 80 pieces of content each month, the page has dramatically increased its followers from 4000 is 2013 to over 400,000 presently (that’s a 100X increase).
You don’t have to create all your content, you could source the best content in your niche using a content curation app like DrumUp, or news aggregation app like News360.
2. Consistent branding to boost brand recall
Think orange, anything come to mind? Handicraft-couture brand Etsy has exemplary branding with its trade-mark orange and brown color scheme. By consistently associating your brand with set colors, fonts and a tone of speaking, you powerfully build a personality for it on social media.
A strong identity is great for brand recall. Establishing one can be tricky, when you don’t have a background in design. However, easy to use image editors like Canva can help you overcome that hiccup.
3. Content that inspires emotion
Emotions create engagement because they’re the one of the best ways to connect with an audience. By connecting with your audience on an emotional level, and bonding with them over ideals, beliefs or things that they care about can give your brand an edge over others. A great example of this is the “Like a girl” campaign.
The campaign empowers women by making people realize the negative connotation attached with the expression, “like a girl”. Empowerment is a strong connector. That’s why motivational quotes get shared on social media as much as they do. You could begin connecting with your audience with something as simple as quotes that align with your brand identity.
A quotes overlay app like Quotes Cover can help you quickly create quote covers.
4. Contests to boost social media visibility
If you’ve noticed, several companies are running fairly simple contests on social media. The rules require participants to like, share and comment on the contest post to stand a chance to win something exciting. Easy contest qualifiers encourage more people to participate, and if one of your qualifiers require people to share a post created by your brand, you are not only engaging your audience but also increasing your brand’s visibility in the process.
To brand your contest with a hashtag and then track its movement, you could use Hashtagify.me.
5. Personalized responses and outreach
Personalized marketing can help you really catch your target audience’s attention and get people excited about your brand. In this day and age where marketing is haunting people on every available space, they yearn for brands that really care. By connecting with your audience one-oh-one, you show them that you do.
This could mean something as simple as personalizing emails or extensive like the famous Morton’s Steak House example.
Both require the aid of active social media listening. You could do this by setting up interesting keyword alerts like your brand name and the word ‘wish’ or your brand name and the word ‘want’, and fulfill those wishes. Tools like Brand 24 monitor the scene and notify you of conversations and people that matter so you can pay attention to them.