If you’ve been using social media in your marketing for a while, you know it isn’t enough to simply post a lot of content.
Effective social media marketing means engaging with your followers. When your followers engage actively with your content, they might comment on it, like it, or repost it.
Most importantly, they’re spending more time thinking about your content and your brand. Boosting engagement is the difference between your followers scrolling past your posts in their newsfeed and taking the time to look at your content and interact with it.
Therefore, increasing engagement should be one of your top goals in your social media marketing strategy. Luckily, it isn’t too hard to do. Try out some of the following ideas to boost your engagement on social media.
Ask Questions
One of the best ways to easily increase follower engagement is to ask questions.
You might ask questions related to your industry, such as what kinds of products your followers are hoping to see or which of your existing products is their favorite. You can also ask general questions. They key is to ask simple questions that can be answered quickly and easily.
Depending on your brand personality, these can range from serious (asking for responses to a recent news development, for example) to silly (asking your followers what their favorite ice cream flavor is, for instance). While these questions may seem irrelevant, the point is that they’re encouraging followers to interact with your brand in a casual way, creating positive associations and developing a relationship.
Some examples of simple questions from Buffer, via Shortstack
Ask for Content
Sometimes the best way to get high-quality engagement is to ask for it directly. Try asking your social media followers for pictures, stories, or feedback about your company.
You can incorporate this content into fun features that will in turn help you to make more posts. For example, you may want to hold a photo contest and use the winning photo as your profile picture for a week. Or you could feature the story of one follower in a short article every week. Using contests with prizes to promote these posts can help you to draw in more submissions.
Include Visuals
One of the best ways to attract attention and engagement is to make your posts visual. According to Social Media Examiner, photos posted to Facebook produced an 87% interaction rate. Images and videos are much more likely than simple text posts to make your followers stop and look at your post. You can post infographics, graphs, pictures of new products, behind-the-scenes images, photos of a company event, video interviews, and so on. The more you use visual elements, the more you likely you are to draw in follower engagement.
Be Responsive
Once you’ve started getting some engagement from your followers, don’t just let it sit there. If you respond to your followers individually, they’ll feel even closer to your brand, and you’ll encourage future engagement. You can accomplish this by responding to comments, replying to tweets, retweeting tweets related to you, reblogging posts, and more. Remember that engagement goes both ways, and customers love to see their favorite brands participating actively in social media conversations.
