Do you spend a lot of time creating content for social media?
Are you curious about how to get more social media engagement and build a stronger connection to your audience?
Social media can quickly become a black hole of time and money with little return on investment. But you’re in luck… with a small tweak in your strategy, you can get more engagement on your social content and be on your way to success in the online world.
In this article, you’ll discover five examples of things you can do to increase your engagement ASAP.
#1: Define Your Content Strategy
Quality engagement requires a quality strategy.
If you look at the social media profiles of top marketers, their content feels natural and organic. It seems that they post content when they feel like it with little thought and instantly gain attention from the masses.
Behind the scenes of those captivating posts is a strategy. Yes, you can share real-life moments with your audience. But, you’ll save yourself a lot of time and get better results by creating an intentional strategy to tell your brand’s story.
Beyond getting more likes and comments, you might want your fans to take specific actions like visiting your website or buying particular products. This is something to consider as you decide what content you’ll share, how frequently, and which channels you’ll use to share your message.
We have a simple content calendar and training to help you map out these items for greater clarity in your content strategy. Check it out below.
Without a strategy, you can post all the content in the world and still not get results. Commit not just to taking action but to making the necessary adjustments to get to where you want to go.
#2: Put On Your “Customer Cap” For Greater Social Media Engagement
At Modern Marketing Plans, we always tell our clients to put on their “customer cap”.
That means taking the time to step into their customers’ head space and think about what they want and need to make their lives better.
Traditional social media strategies are too often focused on pushing content out. A marketing team will sit around and think of all the messages they want to share and craft a schedule to push that content out.
If you want more engagement, make a small shift, and start thinking about how you can pull people in with your content. It may be your business, and it may be your social profile, but if you’re trying to build community and strong engagement, it can’t always be about you.
You got to make some room to put your audience first and consider what will encourage social media engagement and participation in conversations about your content.
#3: Use The Right Hashtags
Your social content will live two lives…
The first is the life it gets through your existing audience and followers. A segment of them will see your posts, often less than 1%. They might share and comment, providing you with additional organic reach.
The other is the life your content is given through hashtags. Using the right hashtags is a great way to get in front of extra people looking for the exact kinds of content you share. By using hashtags, you give yourself a chance to be seen by more people naturally.
However, a word of caution, make sure to switch things up to avoid becoming shadowbanned. Social networks frown on anything that looks like automated activity. If you’re using the same hashtags on each post, you can send a flag to the algorithm and have your content hidden from view.
Craft a specific hashtag strategy and keep things fresh for the best results. Hashtagify is a great tool to support this effort.
#4: Be Human
One of the biggest mistakes brands make that leads to low social media engagement is sounding like a robot.
At Modern Marketing Plans, we help our clients build strategic social media content plans for months in advance to save them time. However, we also account for the human element necessary for people to want to engage with you online.
If it’s clear that you’re just posting content for the sake of posting, people will pick up on that energy, especially if you’re posting the same content in the same way across many channels. People tune out at some point because they know you’re social efforts are just ticking a box off of a to-do list instead of really encouraging engagement.
Keep the human element of your social posts by posting natively within the app (and avoiding schedulers which the networks frown on). Also, set an example of the kind of engagement you support by responding to EVERY single person who leaves a comment on your posts. Thank them for their feedback. When people see that a brand responds, they feel more encouraged to join the conversation.
#5: Get Emotional
Your content should be a gift to your audience. That gift should evoke emotion to either educate, entertain, engage, or inspire them.
When we see content with a high emotional tether, it calls us to take action, whether that be in the form of sharing it with our friends, leaving a comment of our own, or doing research to learn more.
Consider whether or not your content is emotionally engaging. If not, craft a few new angles that can help you get there.
CONCLUSION
Follow these tips and watch your engagement start to skyrocket. After that, you might take the time to build a complete social media marketing plan for your business. You can learn how to build a great social media marketing plan here.
