How To Increase Your Social Media Engagement

There is no denying the value of social media marketing. These profiles have hundreds of millions of followers and are free to access and begin promoting. They rank on search engines, introduce your brand to millions of users and can even act as a functioning website, allowing people to gather information, contact you and even make a purchase. Marketing on it is even better because it’s very cost-effective.

To make things even better, if you have customers and followers who love your brand, they can share your posts, promotions and other content with their friends and family, tag themselves when they use your products or services as well as when they visit your location.

Obviously, results of campaigns will be different based on what type of business you have. For example, a restaurant is going to outperform a mortgage company because people are more interested in food than they are getting a new mortgage. Does that mean the mortgage company shouldn’t advertise on social media? Of course not, it means you have to set realistic expectations and understand the advantages each platform offers you based on the audience, what it can do for your company and what it will cost.

Increasing Engagement

Engagement on social media means clicks, likes, comments and shares. Again, some businesses will have an easier time acquiring clicks than others. However, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be done, even for your business. You have to remember that when someone goes onto Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram, they are looking for information or entertainment. If you can provide them with both you are going to get a much better response.

Know The Platforms

There are dozens of social platforms you can market on but the main ones to focus on for your business as of now include:

• Facebook: Still the largest and most effective platform by far. Business pages can act as functioning websites, ranking on Google, selling products and providing details for your followers to get the information they need.
• Twitter: A great way to interact with individuals, build a following and share blog content and promotions. If you are a heavy blogger, then Twitter is going to be the best place to build a following as you can also utilize hashtags to get more eyes on your content. Don’t be afraid to post 2-5 times a day or more.
• Instagram: A great way to reach a younger audience. However, you need to make sure that you have a lot of visual content including videos and pictures. Hashtags are utilized here as well and the best part is that you can use up to 30 to get as many eyes on a post as possible.
• LinkedIn: This is a great place to set up a personal and business account for a few reasons. Google highly respects these accounts and blogs published on your personal profile will actually get ranked on search engines. It’s also a better platform for B2B marketing as you can reach people based on their specific job areas.

All of these platforms are free and you need to have accounts on them and keep them active. However, if you want to increase engagement you need to focus on producing quality content. Know your strengths and know your audience as well. For example, if you are an insurance company, you are not going to get thousands of likes from a stock photo of someone speaking with an agent unless you boost it, which is a great idea for a promotion. However, if you were to publish a blog on your own site offering free advice on how people can cut their insurance costs by 20% or more and then share and boost that, you are going to see engagement because you are providing free and valuable content that everyone will want to read.

When it comes to social media marketing you need to make sure that you are posting at least once a day on each account. However, take advantage of what each platform provides you and utilize its strengths. Understand your audience and post what they would want to see.