I’m sure you understand the power of social media, as it helps you create an identity online and brand your website, product or service.
Brands are extremely powerful and consumer confidence goes through the roof if you get your branding right.
Social media is a way to reach millions of people all over the world and get similar minded people excited about what you’re doing.
However, there are huge numbers of people approaching social media completely wrong.
Don’t get caught up in the numbers game!
The number of Likes, Followers or +1’s might be a basic indicator of the popularity of that page, but it doesn’t always tell the full story.
Engagement is where the real magic happens on social media.
If you had 10,000 Twitter followers but only got 10 responses and 3 Re Tweets a day then you’re engagement level is extremely low.
Consider having 1,000 followers that respond nearly 50 times in a 24 hour period and that Re Tweet your content 10 times a day.
Which one would you rather have?
The engaged audience become brand ambassadors.
The more your followers interact with you, the better results you will see from social media.
Let’s look at a few tips that can help you increase engagement on any social media channel.
Ask Questions via Social Media
This is the most basic point.
If your Facebook page is just post after post of your products coming up day after day after day, people may look and think ‘oh that’s cool’, but they are never going to bother to comment.
You’ve given them no reason to.
Ask a question, see what your followers think!
“Have any of you seen our latest ebook on Kindle Book Success? Have any of you already got a book published on Amazon’s digital bookstore? Let us know!”, that’s the kind of post that will drive engagement and encourage people to interact.
It’s called social media for a reason!
It’s supposed to be a social experience … not a one way street!
Time your Posts Right
When are most of your followers online?
There are loads of services out there that will help you find this information (Google is your friend people!).
So cater to them!
Why post your best content at 3 in the morning so nobody can see it.
Check the trends on your previous posts and work out a strategy.
Post when you’re likely to get maximum exposure.
You can use TweetDeck, HootSuite or Buffer to schedule your posts.
Diversify your Content in Social Media
This is an important point that I can’t stress enough.
Don’t produce the same kinds of content day after day.
You don’t ever want to be perceived as boring.
Use a little humour from time to time. Use images to increase engagement. People love images.
Plain text is all well and good if it’s putting across the right message, but people are lazy and after a while get bored with reading and just want to quickly scan a picture.
Pictures get the most reaction of any content type. But be diverse. You can be just as boring posting only images as you are posting only text.
Think Videos, Polls, FAQs, Competitions or Podcasts.
Be a jack of all trades!
Conclusion
There you go. A few basic tips that should help you get more engaged with your followers.
As I said at the start of this article, a large following that isn’t engaged is worthless. The whole point of social media is to be social! Don’t be robotic!
Make sure you keep your content diverse, share it at the right time and make sure you respond to people who bother to engage.
You will find that people are much more likely to share your content if they feel like you’ve shown them some gratitude!
What do you think?
Do you have any other tips to add?
Please share them in the comments below, thanks!
Hey Erik!
Great tips here. Asking questions is a great way to build engagement with your audience.
Hmm.. a tip I would share is to find out what type of topics your audience loves to talk about the most and make sure you’re blogging/tweeting about those.
I actually built an app called BuzzSumo that helps with that. It basically is a search engine that shows you the most shared articles for any topic, or for any website (yours or competitors)
Would love to hear whether you’d find it useful 🙂
Henley
Hi Erik,
Great post! I like your viewpoint and examples on engagement. So many of us are caught up in the numbers and do all we can to reach out and gain more followers each and every day. But once we gain those followers what are we doing to effectively engage them?
You make a great point that it is called “social” media for a reason. If we do not ask questions and find unique ways to engage and even inquire about the posts of others, we will never get what we want out of social media. It has to be about building relationships. Sure it may not happen over night but it can be done.
Great Post Erik! Even in organizations across the world, employee engagement is seen as the emerging challenge for the 21st century. Increasingly attention spans of people are getting shorter and the need to be engaged with meaningful content stronger!
And as a Blogger, I would rather have 100 engaged followers and readers than million non-existent fans which just increases the fluff that many people pretend to have and produce very less quality content!
Thanks for sharing! (PS: Love your design)
-Nik
Great post Erik, there is so much to be gained from social media and it’s important to understand how to push your content through these channels in the best way possible.
Alongside your own website and separate content marketing strategies, social opens up additional opportunities to promote and share your content, as well as network and engage with the community that you build.
A well thought out content strategy and a social strategy should really go
hand-in-hand. #3 I does it by Buffer, but I leanred While autoposting are one way to communicate, more businesses are beginning to understand that engaging with their audiences in real conversations will bring them better results and add more value to their social streams. Isn’t ? And also to Leo widrich words, I belive below things will definitely lead in to success
Frequency: Post around 5-10 times a day on Twitter and 1-4 times a day on Facebook for optimal outcome.
Timing: Almost all research studies highlight the main work hours from 8 am to 8 pm as good times to tweet and post to Facebook.
Multiple sites: Post to multiple social sites, in addition to your own blog or website.
Thank you,
Siva
Hi Erik,
Exactly that happens for a many. We can see a facebook page is having ton of fans but what happens when a post gets posted? Just 5-6 likes and 2-3 comments. The engagement level is for them is very low.
I really liked your points. Asking questions on social media is very effective. The fans will feel cheering while answering the question. Timely post is another important thing. Because if we can publish a news first, no doubt we will get some extra attention to it. And content diversifying is also necessary. Without it, the fans will get bored of same contents.
Best of luck, Erik. Have a nice day!
I totally understand what you mean. I’ve been able to handle profiles like what you mentioned.
It’s frustrating trying to engage people that aren’t really engaged/into your stuff. I’ve dropped social pages that havent been social at all in the past, even with 20k followings or so.
Great tips as always Erik!
Well, i thought that increasing social media engagment is not working any more but after reading this article. I realize that i was doing a big mistake. Thank you so, much……