Today, 4.48 billion people currently have social media accounts, and the more of those people that are engaging with your content, the better. An impactful social media strategy must go above and beyond passively posting content across different platforms.
In today’s digital marketplace, people are scrolling faster than ever, and to catch their attention (and secure them as a lead), your content marketing strategy must prioritize actual engagement with the content.
Before you can do that, it is important to understand what engagement means and what it can do for your big or small business.
What is “Engagement”?
While it is true that engagement happens the moment someone likes your post or follows your brand, the real metric for measuring engagement is meaningful connection.
Engagement refers to how people engage with or interact with the content you create and share. Types of engagement with your social media posts can include:
- Favorites
- Likes
- Comments
- Conversations in the comments of DMs
- Shares
- Clicks
- Mentions
The more “work” a client puts into this conversation, the more impactful that engagement will be for your brand.
Consider this scenario: Your construction company puts up a post showing a before and after image of a residential renovation project.
Client A likes the post.
Client B likes the post and comments “beautiful”.
Client C shares your post on their platform and captions it “This is incredible. I wish my house looked like this, don’t you @bestfriend @mom @sister”. This is all done after they have already clicked the post.
The time, energy, thinking and willingness of Client C to not only like, but also comment, repost, and include mentions to people important to them demonstrates that your content has landed with your online audience.
How can social media engagement benefit your company?
Increased Reach
Here’s the thing about social media engagement, the more people engage (especially the way Client C did) the more reach your posts will continue to get.
Social media management means that you will respond to each engagement – whether this means writing back to someone that sent you a direct message, replying to a comment on your Facebook page, or responding to a Google review. In fact, according to buffer.com “answering a complaint on social media can increase customer advocacy by as much as 25%”.
Relationship Building
Conversations on social media can rapidly transform strangers into clients and clients into your brand community. This becomes pivotal for you, as the business owner, to field questions from your target audience and have actual direct conversations with them about your products and services, about their needs, and even set yourself up as a thought leader in your industry.
18 Ways to Improve Customer Engagement with Social Media Marketing
After you have put in the sweat equity required to boost engagement across your social media platforms, you might reach a standstill. This is the time to ramp up your marketing strategy by launching more dynamic and creative engagement activities to increase brand awareness. Here are some tried and true creative digital marketing strategies to keep your social media presence high and fun.
- Engage in conversations with commenters: This does not just mean liking their posts or replying with a generic “thank you”. A great engagement strategy treats every comment like an opportunity for an impactful conversation. This is a surefire way to connect with improving customer engagement on social media in a more memorable way than your competitors.
- Ask questions and ask for answers in your social media posts: Whether you are using the “Poll” sticker on Instagram stories or Facebook, asking questions is an easy, and easy to reply to, way to influence engagement.
- Reply to every single online review: Did you know that many companies have entire teams working on review management? It is essential that all reviews–good, bad, and terrible–get replied to. This shows the unhappy customer that you care, but also shows people reading your reviews that you care, and that you are just a human who also made a mistake.
- Commit to your brand voice/tone: Don’t drift from the brand personality you as an entrepreneur, or your entire company has crafted together. Your client will get to know your brand and associate you with certain grammar, humor (or not), and even post style. Figure out who your brand is online and stick with it. Companies like Canva can help you do this with their online brand kit.
- Get visually exciting: Use high-quality images, short videos, GIFs, infographics, emojis, and inspiring graphic design across your social media content: Emojis, videos, and GIFS are a super fun way to make social media posting more fun attract new customers. Try free tools from resources such as Canva.
- Add hashtags to your tweets: Studies show that you can increase engagement by a whopping 1,065% just by adding hashtags to your tweets. All hashtags are searchable and make it easier for potential clients to find your company online.
- Partner with influencers in your industry: Micro or celeb-level influencers are here to stay. In fact, “in 2020, there were over 106 thousand TikTok influencers worldwide, up from 16.4 thousand in 2018 and 35.5 thousand in 2019.” The impact that these influencers can have on your brand when used on the right social media channel is enormous.
- Follow trends in your field and post about them: A great way to do this is through setting Google Alerts on keywords related to your field, choosing a few key news sources to follow, and reposting/sharing on a regular schedule. This is particularly effective if the information is rewritten in a blog on your website inspiring high click-through rates or on networks like LinkedIn that prioritize this type of content.
- Embrace the meme Culture: There is nothing as relatable as a well-constructed meme in a pool of hyper-filtered and edited photos. Make a certain demographic of your followers smile and laugh by being real and raw.
- Co-create posts and campaigns: Create engaging content with other businesses in your industry and increase your engagement rate almost instantly by accessing one another target audiences.
- Social media takeovers: Whether you give your social media to your staff, your CEO, or your clients to share content for the day, this is a surefire way to get people checking out the more real people (and hopefully the new products) at your company.
- Host a Giveaway or Contest: Studies show accounts that host regular giveaways can grow their following 70% faster than their counterparts and is a great way to ensure retweets and social media sharing.
- Offer free tutorials and how-to videos: These short and succinct videos are extremely popular and engaging especially within niche communities that will excitedly re-share your wisdom.
- Host a Facebook Live event, class, or Q&A series: Time to get personal online. While live events require some courage and more time, they are a great opportunity to show people that you are present, real, and a human behind all that constant posting.
- Run a challenge: Humans love challenges, and they love posting about their successes online. Create a custom challenge calendar on a platform like Canva that they can add stickers to and ask them to post every day. Voila! You just secured a month worth of free content (I.e., 30-day meditation challenge)
- Get personal with posts about family, pets, and food: The most loved posts have always been and will always be the ones that make our hearts flutter.
- Blast user-generated content from your clients: Did someone post an image wearing your product and tag you? Repost it. Every single time. Thank them for sharing and watch your social media engagement soar thanks to these authentic testimonials.
- Partner with a charity or not-for-profit to cross-promote for the good of humanity: Offering services for free to a non-profit can have a big return just in the new publicity you’ll get from their posts/emails to their followers.
How to Measure Customer Engagement
Now that you understand what social media engagement is, how it can benefit your company and how to make an engaging social media presence across your platforms, you need to focus on monitoring, measuring, and reporting on your engagement to turn leads and likes into paying clients.
Monitoring your follower engagement will enable you to determine what platforms are working with your brand, what kinds of copy resonates with your community, whether image, video, or written content garners the most impact with your audience, and what kind of posts your audience typically shares. With this knowledge, you can rework your digital marketing strategy to accommodate your findings.
The top five customer engagement metrics are:
- Post Reach: A simple metric to show how many people have seen the post
- Average Engagement Rate: The number of actions such as likes, shares, and comments each post receives relative to your total number of followers.
- Amplification Rate: This is the actual ratio of shares per post against the total number of followers.
- Virality Rate: This measures the number of people who shared your post compared to the number of unique views it had in a specified time.
- Conversion Rate: This looks at the number of visitors who clicked on your post then took an action on your page relative to the total number of page visitors.
At the end of the day, you need to always remember that social media marketing is about connection. By sharing content that is authentic and makes people feel (from jokes to heart-wrenching videos) you can increase your reach, improve your presence online, and ultimately, drive more traffic to your website resulting in more clients.