Summary
Engagement rates are a measure of the number of people who have connected with content on social networks. The higher the engagement rate, the more successful your campaign. Social media influencers use it as evidence that they have an engaged audience.
There are several creative methods for increasing social media participation. All you have to do is stay focused on your objective and provide quality content on a continuous basis.
Do the people who follow you on social networks interact with you?
Do you want to increase this interaction and have more engagement?
While it’s relatively easy to get new followers or share publications, it takes creativity to get comments and build communication.
In some of my previous guides, I have always stressed the importance of creating audience-focused content to get engagement. In this article, I will further elaborate on the most effective ways for your audience to communicate with you on social media by which you’ll increase the engagement rate.
What’s the Social Media Engagement Rate?
Engagement on social networks shows how many people have connected with the content you market to them. Based on this metric, you can determine if your followers prefer texts, photo posts, or video content, and what topics capture their interest.
With this metric, you can test the interests of your followers, and based on that, you can customize your future behavior on social networks. The high engagement rate shows that people are interested in your story and what you offer them. You can track your engagement rate level via liking, commenting, and sharing of your audience. Although getting only likes isn’t relevant, monitoring the number of likes in combination with other indicators can be very helpful.
Engagement rates are often used by social media marketers to determine the success of a campaign, while social media influencers use it as evidence of their engaged audience.
Also read: My guide on how to get more views on youtube here!
How to calculate the engagement rate?
You calculate it by using the total number of interactions on a post and dividing it by the number of followers of the account. Not every social media has the same criteria for engagement. The criteria for Instagram would include likes, comments, and saves. On Facebook: likes, comments, and shares. On Snapchat: views, screenshots, and replies. The result of an engagement rate is presented as a percentage and can change over time.
Engagement rate is considered one of the most important metrics when reporting on social media analytics. It defines a value defined in numbers used to measure the success/failure of specific content on social media – to what extent users/followers are engaged with a brand/service on social media. There are accounts with thousands of followers, but with a very low engagement rate. That’s an indication of a lack of connection between the followers and the brand/user.
14 Tips for Increasing Social Media Engagement Rate
1. Content Marketing
Content marketing is a form of marketing aimed at creating, publishing, and distributing content to a target audience with the goal of engaging existing and potential customers. From this general content marketing definition, we can see that the ultimate goal is to engage the audience.
If you want to successfully sell your products and services, you need to build a relationship of trust with your potential customers. A great way to achieve this is with content marketing. However, a content marketing strategy shouldn’t only involve the creation of specific content, that is, quantity, but that content must contain certain elements that will encourage your audience to interact, or the content must be of good quality.
In the next few sections, I’ll talk about ways to get your audience interested in your content and get it focused on a particular activity, first and foremost, sharing content on social networks.
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The number of posts shared on social networks is very important, given the total number of posts per day on social networks. You certainly want your posts, which you have put a lot of effort and time into, to get social approval through as many shares as possible. Likewise, the more your content is shared on social networks, the easier it is to reach your target audience because it’s hidden among your audience’s friends and will achieve a greater reach for your posts.
Assuming the content you create is informative, educational, or entertaining and gives some value, if you follow some steps (building authority and conveying emotional stories, encouraging curiosity, designing visually appealing content, and inviting your audience to action), you’ll encourage your audience to interact.
2. Get to Know Your Audience
Before you publish your content on social media, and even before you create it, you need to know what motivates people to share certain content. Research has shown that some of the motives for people to share content on social networks are:
- To entertain other people,
- To present themselves,
- To build relationships with other people,
- To be involved in events,
- To support a brand.
These motives can be reduced to the main one – to connect with other people and feel useful in doing so. That’s why one of your goals in a content marketing strategy should be to make your readers feel “intelligent“ and helpful when sharing your content. Write about some of the latest developments in your industry, give practical and useful tips that solve certain problems in an easy way, all regarding your product or service. So, first, do good research on what your audience wants and then start creating content that interests them.
3. Publish Regularly
Everything is constant. For your page to continue to find public despite the algorithm of some social media, you must regularly publish new posts. Of course, it’s not necessarily about posting every hour, that is, quantity, but rather in their regularity. Posting twice or three times a week can be considered good practice. On the other hand, it’s better to avoid publishing 5 times in the same week and then nothing for a whole month.
4. Choose the Right Timing to Post
Some social media such as Facebook allow you to determine when the majority of your fans are online. To optimize your visibility, it’s therefore useful to know on which days and times your users are most active. By publishing at that time, you increase the chances of interactions.
5. Be Mindful of Your Demographics
Some social media statistics can be particularly helpful. This is the case, for example, with the demographic data of the people who like your page, which allows you to have the insight in, let’s say… Is your audience mainly made up of men or women? Are they rather between 13-17 years old, or 18-24 years old, or 25-34 years old? This valuable information allows you to better understand your fans and therefore, better understand what’s likely to please them.
6. Include Visuals and Infographics
It’s no secret that a post incorporating visuals always generates more interactions than a simple text. This is why each post must be accompanied by a photo or better yet, a video. It’s the same for your texts. Don’t hesitate to play with the emojis or decorate posts with slight touches of colors.
7. Write Relatively Short Posts
Some social networks (like Twitter) limit the number of characters through which you can express your ideas, while others, such as Instagram or Facebook don’t limit the number of characters for posts. Regardless of the limited number of characters or unlimited, be careful not to create too long posts. Your followers don’t have time to read those. They are in a hurry, so they tend to value short content, which they can read at a glance.
8. Opt for Quality Hosting
What every webmaster looks for is to market their social network and monetize it, which is impossible without good hosting. The uptime and the ability to scale up should be on your list of most important features to look for when leasing a web hosting service. Cheap, shared hosting might be something to start with when making a decision on hosting your own social media but you can find yourself running out of resources soon.
Some social networking grows slowly, while others scale at a fast rate – from several hundred to several thousand users in a short period of time. If this happens, your hosting company should be able to handle the additional load. You’ll have to invest in cloud or VPS services to accomplish future goals in terms of growth.
Some highly evaluated plans for social networks come with MySQL hosting. Choosing a provider offering this type of hosting is good for various reasons that go into the favor of your social media stability and engagement rate. All of the reasons come from the database lying in the core of the MySQL hosting – MySQL database. This database is well-known for being a highly secure and reliable database management system used in popular web apps. It assures 24/7 uptime and also unmatched scalability to handle even the most deeply embedded apps using a smaller footprint.
9. Think in Corporate Way
For social media engagement, the posts that work best aren’t necessarily those that talk about its products or services. In reality, it’s rather those who speak of the life of the company who are the most successful. So don’t hesitate to combine your more promotional posts with other more corporate ones such as photos of your employees, your meetings, and company parties.
10. Organize Contests
To generate engagement, nothing beats a contest. People, in general, like free things. Most of them, when they see a contest on social media, says “Why not, I’ve got nothing to lose.“ They will like your post, share it, comment on it, and might like your page in order to participate in your next contests.
11. Create Interaction
The easiest way to interact with your audience is to ask them a question. For instance, you can end a post with the simple stuff: “What about you?“ or “What do you think?“ or “What are you doing this weekend?“ It will provoke their reactions. This isn’t the only way. You can create surveys – ask a specific question, suggest answers, and your fans vote for the one that suits them best. To make it more fun, you can associate an image or a GIF to each response in a poll.
12. Boost Your Posts
Another technique to create engagement: advertisements and post boost. To be more visible with your company page, the solution is to pay, either by creating an advertisement or by boosting your post. The advantage is that you can precisely target the people you want to reach by indicating, for example, that your audience is made up entirely of women of this or that age.
13. Gamify Your Posts
This technique consists of using elements from the game to encourage your audience to perform certain actions, such as completing levels and moving to the next one as in a video game, winning an ultimate prize, which can be a coupon, a gift, etc.
14. Share Other People’s Content
One way to increase engagement is to share other people’s content on social networks. Not only do you get your name in front of a new audience, but if their content is relevant and valuable, they will be more likely to engage with that post. They will be motivated to follow you if your social media feed can supply them with useful information, whether it is yours or not.
Some of the things you could do are:
- Answering a question or comment
- Sharing the content with your audience
- Re-posting the content to another social network (for example, retweet on Twitter)
Wrapping Up!
As you can see there are countless creative ways to increase social media engagement. All you have to do is focus on your goal and be consistent with quality content. So if you are strategizing your content, I am sure these tips will be useful to get better audience engagement.
If you liked this article, you would also like to check my other guides here:
- Review of Ezoic: features, and functions
- Top ways to combine email and social media marketing
- How to boost your SEO using Schema Markup
Let me know in the comments below which topic you would like me to cover in my next articles. Your suggestions are always welcome!
