Growing and maintaining your brand’s social media whilst managing all of the other aspects of your business can seem like a challenge, especially with constant algorithm changes and more content to compete against every day.
However, generating engagement on social media is more than just getting likes on your Instagram post. It’s a way to connect with and understand your customers building relationships over time using valuable content.
We’ve got a few tips for overhauling your social media channels to increase and maintain meaningful engagement.
Know your audience
The first step to building up your social media engagement and your relationship with customers is to research your audience and create personas.
When drafting content, imagine your intended persona reading it. Is it something they care about? Will they take action after reading your post? If the answer is no, delete it and make room for something more valuable.
Post frequently
To maintain organic likes, paid likes, unlikes, mentions, impressions, post engagements, links clicked, reactions, comments and shares you need to adhere to platform algorithms. They tend to change quite often, but regardless, in order for your posts to be visible to your followers, you need to post on a consistent basis.
At the same time, don’t overdo it. Your audience will switch off fast if they are being spammed with messaging. We recommend you post:
- No more than once a day on Facebook
- No more than twice a day on Instagram
- At least once a day on Twitter
- As much as you want on Instagram Stories
- No more than once a day on LinkedIn
Talk about topics, not just your brand
What are your followers talking about this week? Joining the conversation is an easy way to connect with others and enhance the chance of going viral.
Show your community that you’re up to date on industry news and a voice of reason online. When people see that you have knowledge on a topic and you’re not just pushing products or services, it will increase trust in your brand. As a result, users will want to engage with you.
Use visuals
You don’t want your posts to get lost in a sea of mindless thoughts, so give them a little pizazz. Adding a gif to your tweet will make someone much more likely to read it while attracting your intended response.
Video continues to dominate performance on social media. For example, on Twitter, tweets with video gain 10x more engagement, than those without. They catch people’s attention long enough to hear what you’re saying. They’re also more likely to get reshared than just a simple text post, so putting the extra effort in to create a bespoke video can pay off.
Keep in mind that you need to stand out from the crowd. If you’re sharing the same viral video as other pages, you’re blending in. Think about allocating some budget to creating original, quality videos that your users will want to share.
Make your customers feel important
The world of social media is instant, and your audience expects nothing less. While responding to your audience with a sense of immediacy is encouraged, it isn’t always possible. Consider setting up a time-frame no longer than 24 hours to get back to responses. You can even set up an automated response thanking people for their replies and informing them of your intended personalised response to avoid people feeling ignored. This also helps in creating trust as users feel cared for by your brand. Thus leaving a stronger likelihood of them engaging in conversation with you in the future as they believe that their input is valued.
Monitor engagement
Putting effort into your social media engagement is great, but it means very little if you are not monitoring your growth. Using tools such as Google Analytics, or even a specific social media monitoring platform such as Sprout, is a great way to analyse details about your social media and website visitors.
Documenting something simple like which types of posts your followers respond to best can affect how fast your brand grows online. You can delve deeper by using tracking links and using Analytics to see how users engage with your content, including dwell times and bounce rates. But we’ll save that one for another day…
The world of social media is constantly evolving as trends and algorithms change. What worked for you six months ago may not now, and that can be why your engagement is only superficial. It is important to test and test again until you find the right results.
At Jam, we offer every aspect of social media management, from building profiles to posting content, community engagement, managing campaigns and implementing paid social strategies that deliver true ROI. Want to have a chat about implementing a winning strategy? Get in touch at hello@wearejam.agency or call 0161 850 0565.
