Promoting a business on the Internet, as well as doing business offline, requires a serious approach. Especially when it comes to calculating results or evaluating the profitability of a particular promotion channel. Social networks are no exception, your followers' activity, likes, reposts and comments are all metrics that need to be constantly counted, analyzed and tracked. Why engagement levels are so important and how to properly engage your audience and activate social media, we'll explore below.
7 Types of Social Media Engagement Posts
The foundation for quality engagement posts for social media is a comprehensive approach. There are different options for using them and influencing your audience. The main options for approaches to compiling engaging posts can be divided into 7 different interactive approaches, just as often, you can find mentions of ready-made templates for social media posts. Interactive are needed to increase engagement coverage in social networks, the formation of a loyal audience and its research, which helps to better know the audience.
Riddle, puzzles.
Not too cumbersome games in which it is enough to perform the simplest action (solve a puzzle, solve an arithmetic problem) and then just leave the answer in the commentary.
Quotes/jokes.
In most cases, these are important statements, understandable to the audience, which evoke empathy and emotion from users and encourage some kind of action and communication with the brand.
Questions.
Communicate with your subscribers and ask them questions and provide topics for discussion. Your task is to achieve communication in your comments. The topic can be unrelated or indirectly related to the brand's products. It will be important for users to express their opinions and hear the opinions of others, you need to give them a platform to broadcast their thoughts.
Contests.
Everyone loves getting gifts, especially when you don't have to do anything special to get them. Small contests with nice prizes will increase your audience's loyalty.
Predictions.
Interactive, where users randomly receive a prediction and share it in the comments with other users. Communicate with each other and increase the conversion rate of your social network.
Situations.
Adapting trends is a very important part of your success. You need to keep up with all the innovations and incorporate them into your profile.
What is Social Media Content and How it Affects Audience Engagement?
Content is the basis of promoting your business or personal page. Your profile's interaction with your audience begins with the customer's consumption of your social media content.
Creating quality content is one of the foundations of running a successful business and attracting an audience. To be interesting, it's not enough to just be. Analyze your audience and determine the business that will be most useful to them. Communicate, talk about yourself, give emotion, surprise, test new things and watch for feedback.
Choose your publications responsibly. Let them be unexpected at times, but with a unique style.
It is important to consider the timing of the posts. Social media posts for engagement should appear at certain hours, a third of the population spends more than 3 hours on social media every day. Of course, it would be ideal to know the exact time intervals of users online, but average guidelines can help too. Posts made in the morning and evening tend to reach more users because that's when they're going to work or have already broken out of their routine. In general, it's also very important to remember to be personalized.
Observe the behavior of your real audience. Also, keep a balance in the number of postings. Don't keep users waiting for content, but don't over-saturate them with your newsfeed presence either. Audience engagement occurs differently in different social media formats. Two types of engagement can be distinguished: simple and complex.
Simple engagement is appropriate for communities focused on mass audiences:
movie theaters, department stores;
mass-market products;
for communities with weak engagement and a lack of a loyal core of active followers.
Simple mechanics include puzzles, arithmetic problems, reposts and other interactives where the user needs to perform a simple action.
Complex mechanics are suitable for communities with a narrow audience:
healthy food;
niche cosmetics;
educational courses for children, etc.
For communities with good engagement and a strong loyal core of subscribers. In such mechanics, users need to perform several different actions:
write reviews;
answer questions;
vote, participate in quests to compete with other participants or win cool prizes.
For inactive communities and mass audiences, complex mechanics are often incomprehensible. As a result, activity is ineffective.
For engaged communities with a certain set of competencies, by contrast, simple mechanics can be too boring. If you're just starting to promote a community and know little about your audience, start with the simplest mechanics. For example, "do a repost and enter a raffle" or "solve a problem and get a discount." Over time, once you get a good response, try introducing more complex formats. Otherwise, you risk wasting time and effort on complicated interactivity that won't interest your audience.
People are always on the lookout for new content and expect brands to consistently deliver it. However, before you can start implementing creative ideas and increasing engagement, you need to develop an engagement strategy. Obviously, each social media account requires a different approach.
First decide for yourself which channels you want to focus on, and carefully examine what works for each one and what doesn't. Here's a sample plan to review before you start applying your strategies:
Determine your priorities;
Research your target audience;
Determine important metrics to track;
Conduct a competitor analysis;
Focus on timeliness and relevance;
Practice goal-oriented communication within your team.
Create plans for each platform you use. Consider all the nuances that will help you maximize engagement. Before we get to the specifics, here are some general tips:
Be consistent;
Stay focused on the message;
Stay on top of current trends;
Do A/B testing when possible;
Analyze direct and indirect results.
Since most platforms require attaching images for better generating engagement, you need to learn the basics of photo editing. Start with high-quality photos so that the photos are sharp, focused on the subject and match the color scheme, style and tone of the brand to some degree.
Then you can move on to one of the following editing apps (or use them together):
Lightroom;
VSCO;
Adobe Photoshop Express;
AfterLight2.
Programs and add-ons to increase the effectiveness of work with audience engagement are very popular. Structuring and analyzing content with the help of such programs becomes much easier, and the effectiveness of the work increases many times over. Graphical editors, tables and full social media content calendars help users capture more information. Each of the methods gives a certain range of possibilities and is responsible for different aspects, but more often professionals advise to use social media content calendars to simplify the work with the content and quality control of the consumer engagement social media posts.
Ways to Increase Social Media Engagement
So, what does social media engagement mean?
It used to be that the main indicator of an account's success was the number of followers, and the pinnacle of the promotion strategy was getting as many followers as possible. Over time, the concept changed, and it became clear that a lot does not mean good; the number of dead subscribers negatively affects status. This policy was replaced by the struggle for the attention of the active audience. The measure of the effectiveness of investments was the growth of the level of interest.
Social media engagement shows how interesting your accounts are to other people. Engagement rate is one of the most important metrics for any brand or Influencer running a social media account. The higher this metric, the more active the audience, and the larger it is. And therefore, the greater the number of potential customers.
If you decide to use social media as a business platform, more often than not your goal is to attract customers.
Therefore, working on engagement should be the main criterion for the success of your campaign. Algorithms dictate the rules. As the number of audience reactions to the content you offer increases, you become more visible to social media boost. By working to make your content and profile appealing to users, you increase your likelihood of getting into the news feed of potential buyers many times over.
Increasing social media engagement is often helped by a coordinated combination of tools and metrics, such as:
building relationships and trust with your audience;
increasing brand awareness;
and improving your account's position in search results.
By tracking these metrics, you'll know if your publications are achieving their goals or if your profile strategy still needs tweaking. Therefore, it is important not only to make a first impression, but also to be able to retain the audience's sympathy in the long run.
It takes painstaking work to build users' trust in your product and motivate them to make purchases with your account content. If not yourself, who knows the main goals of your business?
Determine the expectations you want to meet with your social media profile. Ill-conceived content is worse than silent feeds. Once you've chosen your target audience, you can build a plan of action, working to get your customers to volunteer to do what you want them to do.
Increase brand awareness or build communication with your audience? Increase sales or act as an additional customer support channel? There are many options!
Options for Counting Engaged Audiences
To be confident of success, you need a clear understanding of your direction and your future plans. It's important to be able to count your audience's engagement in your social media context.
Engagement Percentage = Total Engagement / Total Number of Followers x 100%.
Total engagement usually shows all of your interactions with your consumers as a whole (comments, reaction reports, etc.), while the total number of followers can only show a simple formal number in the count of subscriptions to your account.
For example, if you post your content on Instagram with 10,000 followers and get 200 likes, 100 comments and 50 reposts. In this case, your total engagement rate would be:
(200+100+50) / 10,000 x 100% = 3.5%.
In fact, there are a lot of different forms at this point, there are more well-known and mathematically accurate ones like this one:
Reach: ERR = total number of interactions with the publication / publication reach x 100%.
Daily Engagement: EPR = total number of interactions per day / total number of subscriber’s x 100%.
Views: EPR = total number of interactions with a video publication / total number of video views x 100%.
Reactions: EPR reactions = total number of interactions with the publication / total number of reactions x 100%.
Your subscribers' interactions with social platforms need to be treated very carefully at all times and monitor the dynamics of their relationships. It can take quite a long time before you can see the results, during which you will study and analyze your audience, trying to build the right interaction with it. The more you pay attention to this, the greater will be the success at the end of this journey. It is also a prerequisite that you need to track analytical data over time.
Conclusion
Social media is a powerful tool that helps Influencers and brands connect with potential customers. And if you want to succeed, use the long-term and short-term strategies listed above. Then provide fast and friendly customer support on social media, strengthen the connection with your brand, increase your reach and boost your sales.
