What Is Social Media Engagement?
By Jared Price (MSB’23)
Social media engagement is a measure of how people are interacting with your social media content. There are several metrics used to track interaction and activity across social media platforms: number of likes, comments, shares, retweets, followers and audience growth, click-throughs, tagged or untagged mentions, etc. The popular social media platforms for marketing include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, and TikTok. Regardless of the platform or metric, high levels of engagement shows that followers are interested in your posts and want to support your business. High engagement is heavily correlated with better marketing reach, greater brand awareness, and improvement in ROI.
Improving Social Media Engagement
A big challenge facing companies’ marketing efforts, especially in the wake of the pandemic, is low engagement rate across social media platforms. Social media engagement is critical to enhancing marketing reach and creating greater brand awareness. Luckily, there are several steps that can be taken to improve your business’s social media engagement. Below we break down some important tips to help boost engagement rate across your platforms:
1. Analyze your engagement
It is important to establish a baseline before putting an engagement strategy into place. Tracking your current number of followers, comments, like, and shares on average per post will help you measure your growth going forward. Make sure to track your engagement regularly and think about what trends are influencing your data (i.e. if certain posts working better than others, specific months generate more engagement than others, etc.).
2. Get to know your audience
Conducting audience research is a great way to gauge who is interacting with your content. Make the effort to identify and analyze your target market – learn as much as you can about their demographics, interests, other likes, etc. From there, you will gain a better understanding of which social media platforms to post on, when to publish, what type of content is likely to generate the most engagement, your brand image, and much more.
3. User-Generated Content
A great way to boost media engagement is to encourage more user-generated content. Having clients post about your company on social media about the services they received is useful. tactic that allows clients to interact with your brand and get their content featured on your profile. Depending on the platform, there are several creative ways to get your audience into your content: answering user-generated questions, posting polls, hosting media upload contests, or simply spotlighting customers in your story.
4. Real-Time Interactions
Another tactic is to better utilize social media reach to create real-time interactions with clients. For example, employees could host weekly Q&A’s about their work using Instagram and Facebook Live Video features. Another form of real-time interaction could include manually replying to your audience directly on platforms by monitoring and engaging in the comments section. These are creative ways of engaging your audience.
5. Quality AND Quantity
Lastly, posting frequently and using high-quality visuals (photos, videos, infographics, GIFS) across all platforms is critical to boosting engagement. There are many third-party sites that help generate high-quality content. Canva is a very simple and efficient third-party photo editor for your branding images and content posts. HMFI’s marketing team uses canva to create and design our media posts. There are several other options available as well.
6. Don’t be afraid to experiment
Implementing any or all of these ideas will surely lead to increased engagement rates across our platforms. Take the time to plan your engagement strategy and put it into action. With many businesses still operating virtually, it is critical that your small business knows how to create and share valuable content across social media platforms.
Published on April 25, 2021