What Is Social Media Engagement?
Businesses use social media to connect with customers and promote their products or services.
However, social media engagement is not just about promoting your business; it’s also about creating a connection with your followers through quality content.
Engagement on social platforms is any interaction that a user has with a post. This can be anything from clicking on the post, commenting on the post, sharing the post, or liking the post.
The more quality engagement a post receives, the more likely it is to show up in other users’ newsfeeds.
Why Is Social Media Engagement Important for Businesses?
With an astounding 4.55 billion social media users around the globe, social media is an indispensable tool for businesses in today’s digital world.
Social media engagement is the social equivalent of a handshake. It’s about establishing social rapport, building relationships and gaining rich insights about prospective customers through social channels.
Social media engagement is important because it helps you connect with your customers and followers. It also helps you build trust and credibility with them. When people interact with your social media posts, they are more likely to become customers or clients.
As we enter the year 2022, social media engagement will only become more important for businesses, and here is the simplest explanation:
It’s What The Customers Want
Customers want prompt, direct and personalised responses from brands.
Many customers are now reaching out to brands through social brands when they have a question or issue.
Based on statistics, digital channels will handle 60% of customer service inquiries by 2023.
Social media has also become a hub for information about a brand. When a potential customer is considering buying for you, they will check your company’s social media channels to see feedback, comments and reviews from your existing customers. It is why many successful brands take social listening very seriously; one bad review can have more impact than ten good reviews.
Take your own online shopping experience as an example.
Ten people are saying that Company XYZ’s eBook is a definitive guide to quality content marketing, but there’s one person who says that anyone can easily find the information from the eBook by searching the internet.
Still, that’s enough to make you start weighing the pros and cons of buying the book, or cause you to deliberate the purchase!
How To Improve Your Social Media Engagement
Smaller brands typically receive lower social media engagement because they don’t have the same resources as bigger brands to promote their social media accounts and encourage quality engagement.
Despite this, many of these brands get around this issue by using these tips and strategies:
Keep Up With Algorithm Changes or Updates
On top of my checklist is always being mindful of any changes to a platform’s algorithm.
Each social media site has its algorithm, a mathematical equation that defines how social media platforms rank social media posts. These algorithms are constantly changing, so you need to keep up with the changes and adapt accordingly.
How many people will see your content? How often will they see your content?
There are many factors when a platform is considering promoting your content or not. They include:
Dwell time
How long someone spends on your content
Initial engagement
Likes, comments and share in the first few hours post-publishing
Type of content
Video, image, text-only, documents
Social proof
Do influencers with high visibility and following engage with your content?
When you optimise your content based on the algorithm, higher engagement will naturally follow because more qualified viewers are consuming your content.
On an important note, if you use LinkedIn as your primary lead generation channel, did you know about this latest algorithm change on the networking platform?
Produce Interactive Content
It’s good to account for the social media algorithm, but that’s only the initial step. You can optimise your content to win the algorithm’s favour, but you should always write for people.
Social and interactive content appeals to emotions and feelings. When people can resonate with your content and feel like they will belong in a community of like-minded people when they join in on the conversation, that’s when social media engagement really soars.
Here’s how you can make your content more interactive:
- Storytelling: Use a compelling and relatable story.
- Hashtag campaigns: Create social media hashtags for your campaign or event so that people can easily spread the message. Alternatively, research on which hashtags are trending on a specific platform.
- Encourage social sharing: Make it easy for your audience to share and engage with you on social media by providing text, images or buttons that allow them to do so.
- User-generated content: Share user-generated content or ask your audience to contribute to a social media campaign.
- Have calls-to-action: All social media posts should have a call to action. Ask people to take the next step with you, whether that’s sharing your content or making an online purchase.
- Add on images or videos: There’s nothing like visuals to make your content pop.
- Organise giveaways or competitions: Everyone loves free stuff, and running a social media contest is a great way to get people engaged.
Be More Responsive to Social Mentions
It’s like a cycle: responding to your audience or current customers’ comments or queries on social media may, in turn, encourage more social media engagement because they see that you’re responsive to others like them. This is also a good signal to your target audience that you’re an active brand that cares about your customers.
Social listening is a powerful tool to foster customer advocacy, so start building up that two-way communication with your engaged audience on social media!
Bottom Line
Social media engagement will continue to be an important factor for businesses in 2022. By keeping up with algorithm changes, producing interactive content, and being more responsive to social mentions, business owners like you can encourage social media engagement and boost your brand’s online presence.
If you’re still having trouble getting people to engage with your LinkedIn posts, here’s a powerful LinkedIn content strategy guide that can turn things around for you.
