3 Fundamental Strategies for Increasing Social Media Engagement

7 years ago | Posted in: Business, Technology | 807 Views

One of the biggest challenges that businesses have when it comes to social media marketing is engaging their audience. Getting and keeping the attention of your audience is difficult as you have to compete with everything else that they’re inundated with. Surprisingly, the key to increasing engagement on your social media platform lies in the fundamentals. Here are the three core things that will help you get results from your social media marketing.

Understand Your Audience

The key to striking a chord with your audience is to really understand who they are. In most cases, your audience will be made up of several social media user personas. If you don’t really understand your social media user personas, this guide will help you create profiles of your social media user personas. Sometimes you have to create these personas to really understand the audience that you should be targeting.

Once you really understand the personas your audience is made up of, you can start researching their interests, opinions, language, needs and wants. This can be done by joining Facebook groups, studying social media conversations, chatting in online forums and reading blogs that they frequent. While this process requires that you invest a lot of time into research, it will be well worth it in the end. You’ll learn exactly how you should communicate with your audience which will translate into higher engagement numbers.

This process will also help you understand what really resonates with your audience. You can see what social media posts your audience resonates with, what kind of blog content that they want to read and what conversations they’re having with other people in the audience. A helpful tool for understanding what makes your audience tick is BuzzSumo. It will pull up results of the most popular social media posts based on your keyword. Here are several reasons why you should use this BuzzSumo.

Focus on Publishing Great Content

A common mistake that many businesses make is using social media solely as a promotion platform. They may share some helpful posts every now and then but most of their posts are designed to sell something. The better decision is to create and share great content that your audience will be interested in and get value out of. Doing this helps build a relationship with your audience which will naturally increase engagement over time.

Because your average follower’s social media feed is riddled with tons of content, you need to make sure that yours stands out. Try to always use images in your posts as they can have as high as an 87% interaction rate. One type of content that tends to do well is visual content like infographics, animated images or visual guides. If you’re using videos, consider using video captioning services to help hearing impaired viewers and to make your video content easier to understand for the average user.

Another big part of making your content work is making sure you use attention grabbing titles. Your title will determine whether your followers read your post or not. You have to remember that the average user receives a ton of content in their social media feed. To stand out in their feed, you need a title that’s going to shock them, generate curiosity, promise them value or elicit strong emotions. Here is a helpful guide that will get you creating great titles in no time.

Put Your Personality Out There

Businesses seem to forget that social media is a channel designed to help people socialize. Instead of using a unique personality to engage with their audience, they use a cold and corporate voice to address them. This can make it seem like your social media profile is only there to serve as an avatar for your business. If you really want to connect and increase engagement, you have to develop a unique personality that resonates with your audience.

Successful bloggers tend to do this very well. You’ll find all types of blogger personalities from ones that are strongly opinionated on a subject matter, have a unique sense of humor, convey an identity their readers can connect with (moms, aficionados, beginners, etc.), to experts that talk authoritatively. Your social media personality doesn’t necessarily have to be over the top. You just have to make sure that you are authentic and distinguishable from the masses.

Those are the three fundamental strategies you’ll need to use to increase engagement on social media. As you can see, it’s not about using a special tactic or trick. It’s about understanding your audience, delivering value to them and connecting with them through your personality.

 

by: Devin Caldwell 

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