The internet and technology are everywhere you look, so the best way to reach millions of people at the same time is through the internet and technology. In the age of smartphones, televisions, radio, and computers, promoting your brand through digital outlets is one of the best moves you can make for your business.
Moreover, given the popularity of the internet, brands have begun prioritizing online marketing and advertising as critical components of their digital marketing strategies. This includes emails, promotional content, social media engagement, banner ads, and display advertising.
Although social media began as a way to help people connect and communicate with their friends and family online, over the years, it has evolved into a highly effective marketing tool for people to promote their brands and products.
People worldwide use social media for marketing their brands, products, e-commerce websites, and services. Now, social media falls under digital marketing and is a highly lucrative and effective form of marketing that a typical e-commerce agency does.
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is a form of marketing that uses social media platforms to promote a brand. These platforms include Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc.
Statistics illustrate that approximately 3.96 billion people worldwide use social media every day, making it more than half of the world’s population. That staggering number makes it one of the most famous avenues where businesses market their products and brand. Information reaches consumers quickly and in entertaining ways, making social media marketing a priority investment for digital marketers.
It’s important to remember that you should have a user-friendly web design and a glitch-free website if you’re promoting an e-commerce site or business website through social media accounts. It’s advisable to hire a web design service to create a professional website at the backend of your social media accounts. In order to keep up with security updates, encourage traffic growth, check your website for issues and make sure that Google is happy, you should perform website maintenance.
Social Media Engagement: Why is it Important?
The way that social media helps you promote your business or brand is through engagement. Think of likes, followers, retweets, comments, replies, shares, and subscribers. Whether you’re an individual simply looking to grow your social media account, an influencer looking to establish a name in your niche, or a business owner wanting to promote products, social media engagement can be highly effective when done correctly, especially when using social media analytics tools.
Social media platforms typically have “feeds” or “discover” pages where users can discover new content and accounts to follow. Instagram and Snapchat both have discover pages that can be used as examples.
Algorithms pick these accounts based on likes or views. The algorithm registers all users’ preferences; what accounts they follow, what videos or photos they like, and what keywords they search. According to these preferences, the app or site shows you content that you are likely to be interested in. In a way, the algorithm does the work for you when narrowing down your consumer base and critical demographic.
Similarly, Twitter displays tweets liked and retweeted tweets by accounts you follow on your Twitter feed. The more likes and retweets your tweets get, the more people see them. For businesses, this means more exposure to their consumers. Many reasons make engagement rates a crucial aspect of your social media engagement strategy.
Here are two primary reasons why engagement is vital on social media
1. Boost Brand Awareness
More engagement means more brand awareness. The more people see your content and interact with it, the more they’ll be able to recall your account and brand. This is why it’s essential to diversify your reach across multiple platforms and outlets. While placing ads can be pricey for small influencers and businesses, organically garnering engagement through numerous social media outlets can get you a high reward from smaller investments.
2. Boost Revenue
A high engagement rate means more potential customers enter conversion funnels. The more consumers engage with your content, the more likely you will get new customers who will purchase whatever you’re selling. That should be considered in your relationship marketing strategy to grow long-lasting relationships with all of your customers.
If your business is social media content-based, it automatically increases your revenue, given that every new visitor on your page is a conversion. For example, if you’re running a YouTube channel, more views mean more people see your videos on their feeds, more people watch your videos, giving you more chances to get new subscribers.
Social media engagement is what social media marketing is all about. Your social media accounts are not serving their function without attention, and you probably should revamp your social media strategy. Unfortunately, it can be tricky to get high engagement rates on social media, given how saturated the platforms are with millions and billions of versions of the same content.
If you’re looking for tips on how to improve your social media engagement, you came to the right place. Here’s a breakdown of how you can boost engagement on some popular social media sites.
Twitter is one of the biggest social media giants in the world, with over 300 million users globally. It’s known as one of the biggest marketing platforms in the world. Sounds great, right? Well, it can be, with the right tools. Twitter is not easy to master, but you can significantly improve your brand’s performance through engagement on the platform with some tools in your arsenal. Here’s how you can grow your Twitter account and boost engagement on it.
1. Use Quality and Quantity
You need to maintain a balance between quality tweets and their quantity. The worst thing you can do is bombard your followers with repetitive tweets plugging your content and website.
Post quality tweets; compelling, carefully curated tweets that make your followers want to click on your content. Moreover, with quality content backing up your tweets, your followers are more likely to retweet your tweets and share your content on their social media.
Now, how do you remain relevant and memorable, and get more engagement without being pushy? Moderation is your answer. Post during high-engagement times throughout the day. This brings us to our next point.
2. Timing is Key
Twitter, like other social media platforms, has peak times when its users are most active. This is usually around noon during the day and at night between 8 pm to 11 pm. Post during peak times to get the most out of your content in terms of engagement. If you post during hours when your followers are inactive, your tweets will be lower on their timelines as more peak hours tweets come in.
3. Be Concise
Twitter already has a character limit of 280 on tweets, so you can’t make your tweets too long even if you tried. However, in terms of the content of your tweets, focus on making it engaging and captivating, not necessarily comprehensive and informative. Tweets are small tidbits of information delivered in entertaining and eye-catching ways. That’s why Twitter is a micro-blogging platform, not a blogging platform.
So, avoid adding chunky excerpts from your website blogs; keep it short and compelling!
4. Have a Personality
It’s no secret that people don’t like being actively advertised to; customers tend to find it annoying if you’re constantly plugging promotional content. This is why it’s essential to curate a personality for your account that does not advertise to followers 24/7.
Try to be entertaining or engaging; tweet about your opinions on relatable topics, be funny once in a while, partake in trending memes if you can. This will help users see you as more than something they’re supposed to be buying, but more like a person they’re following. A personality humanizes you and helps followers relate to you. They’ll engage with your content more if they like your Twitter personality.
5. Use Rich Media
Rich media includes audio, video, and photos. Visual graphics are more eye-catching than words. Think about when you were little; did you gravitate towards wordy books or books with more pictures? The same rules apply here. Try to incorporate media in your Twitter content; be it short videos, photos, or even gifs.
Whenever you tweet something that links back to your blog or website, perhaps a new article, a sale, tweet it alongside a piece of rich media. It can be a picture, an infographic, or a short video.
6. Trends
Twitter trends are guided by algorithms detecting what users are tweeting about on a given day in a given location. Twitter trends are both local and global. By hopping onto trends, you’re increasing the chances of an audience engaging with your tweets. Your tweets will appear when users search for a trending topic, automatically giving your content more exposure and ideally, engagement.
These kinds of tweets set you apart from accounts that only tweet words. When your followers scroll through your timeline, their eyes will fixate more on visually appealing tweets, increasing their engagement with your content.
Now that we’ve talked about the best practices to boost engagement on Twitter let’s move on to the next platform.
It is compelling.” and popular social media platform, with over 2.6 million active worldwide users. For the current generation of active internet users, MySpace and Facebook were the first social media sites. Needless to say, if you want to get into social media marketing, you want to make user engagement on this social media priority.
Facebook algorithm categorizes content on user news feeds by ranking content based on relatability, user interest, and high engagement. Ideally, you want to increase engagement on your account to rank higher and show up more frequently on user news feeds.
Here are the best practices to help you boost user engagement on Facebook.
1. Take Advantage of the React Feature
In 2016, Facebook introduced the “react” feature on the site; users could only like or comment on a post; they could now react under them with sadness, anger, humor, sadness, love, shock, and even a hug!
You may not know this, but post reactions are more substantial to this social media algorithm than simple likes. This is why it’s essential to create content that gets a reaction out of your followers, ideally anything but anger.
You can post content that gets laughs or exciting content that garners shock reactions. This will boost engagement on your account by having followers and friends ‘react’ instead of merely liking a post, which in turn will increase how your account ranks on people’s news feed.
2. Engaging Content
This is similar to the last point, except in this case, we’re advising you to post content that garners more than reactions. Comments and shares carry even more weightage than reactions on a post. One way to get more comments and shares on your post is to pose a question and spark conversation on a topic.
You don’t necessarily need to be controversial, just interesting. Follow popular trends on social media and post content related to these trends. Trendy content will get more engagement because more people are interested in the trend; that’s why it’s a trend.
3. Go Live
Going live can be nerve-wracking if you lack confidence. However, we’re here to tell you that it will probably be worth it! Live broadcasts on Facebook Live get considerably more engagement than engagement posts on social media, and it’s more entertaining and interactive. If you can go live on the site frequently, it will significantly increase engagement on your account.
We’ve discussed Twitter and Facebook engagement; let’s move on to the third social media platform, Instagram.
3. Instagram
Instagram is one of the most used apps in the world, with 1 billion active users currently. Needless to say, making it big on this app is tricky. Figuring out how to grow your following organically can be hit or miss. Luckily, Instagram did us all a favor when they explained how their app algorithm works through a series of tweets in 2019.
According to Instagram itself, the algorithm uses information from users to determine what shows up on their timelines and discover feeds. This information includes the accounts you follow, the accounts you interact most with, the genre of posts you engage with the most, and even what searches you type into the app search engine.
Here are the best practices that will help boost engagement on your Instagram account.
1. Good Quality Media
Instagram is a video and photo-sharing app, so the visual appeal is a huge factor in making or breaking the performance of your account. High-quality photos and videos are more appealing to the users’ eyes than low-quality, blurry content.
Instagram is notorious for reducing the quality of your media, so try to make it as high-resolution as possible, so the quality is not compromised. Good quality media will appeal more to your audience and boost engagement with your content.
2. Regular Stories
Even though the Instagram algorithms don’t prioritize stories, this one is all about staying in your audience’s line of sight. Frequently posting Instagram stories can help you boost brand awareness and, in turn, brand engagement. An excellent way to promote interactions on stories is to ask questions, start discussions, and do polls.
Like stories, going Live on the app is also a great way to increase engagement with your account. When you go live, your followers are notified unless they choose not to in their settings. Live stories are also displayed first on the Instagram stories section, automatically prioritizing your broadcast over other stories.
3. Comments
Comments are an effective form of user engagement that carries a lot of weight with the algorithm. When Instagram sees many users interacting with something, it’ll show it more to other people the algorithm thinks might be interested in that content.
An excellent way to boost comments on your engagement posts for social media is to caption your posts in ways that spark reactions and discussions. Ask questions, incorporate calls to action such as “Tag someone who ________________” etc to get your audience to engage with your posts.
4. Hashtags
Hashtags are essential for Instagram engagement. There are tags that categorize your posts under different identifiers. For example, if you posted a picture of keto food, you’d use hashtags like “#breakfast, #keto #diet #healthy #living”. Instagram algorithms place hashtagged content on public discovery feeds, not just your followers.
It helps get your content on more discovery feeds, increasing your reach and engagement with your target audience. Moreover, if someone searches for a hashtag, your post will show up in the results. How your post ranks on the results is based on how much engagement it gets.
The Bottom Line
Digital marketing is huge these days, with countless businesses using various forms to promote their brands and boost their lead generation. Social media is not simply a way to connect with and hang out with friends. It can be an excellent marketing tool to grow your personal brand or business.
Mastering social media can be tricky; since so many people use it, content is bound to get repetitive. To stand out, you need to create content that engages your audience base and keeps them entertained.
This article walks you through the best practices to apply to your social media community engagement strategy for the world’s most popular social media sites. If you’ve been struggling to get engagement on your social media accounts, we highly recommend you try out these tips and tricks to boost your user engagement!
