Social media marketing is all about engagement. It doesn’t matter whether you have fancy editing skills, a powerful ad budget or a substantial following for your brand, without engagement, these factors remain stagnant, unappreciated and unwanted.
Engagement drives success for a small business. Whether you look at it algorithmically as social media platforms push posts with the most engagement to the top, or you look at the opportunity to build relationships with potential sales leads, engagement is key if you’re looking to make it to the top of the digital high street.
As brands continue to face the repercussions of Covid-19, don’t be disheartened if you’ve seen a dip in your engagement stats. After recent studies revealed that over 85,000 small businesses moved online during the pandemic, the competition has well and truly risen and the battle to fight for your demographic’s engagement has never been harder.
As you can see above, the Covid-19 crisis has only accelerated the digitalisation of the high street, suggesting that you might need to pick up some new tactics if you want to stay on top of the game.
Whether you’re worried about those analytics, or simply new to the social media game, we have you covered with our 6 engagement boosting tricks that will have you standing miles in front of your e-Commerce competitors.
Before You Start Fixing, Find The Problem
The best way to start improving your engagement is to identify the problem first. One of the most common marketing mistakes is to ignore those analytics and push forward without a data-driven direction.
In order to successfully grow your engagement across both your social channels and your site, investing your time in an analytics tool such as Google Analytics or Finteza will pay off in the long run.
Using a simple analytics analysis like the one above will boost your understanding of your audience and their behaviours, while also tracking the number of visitors clicking through your site and socials. It’s here that you will be able to identify the low engagement offenders.
See which pages are doing well, what posts are receiving the most likes and comments and compare these with your lowest-performing content. This will give you your first insight into the problem, so you can create an effective retargeting solution.
6 Social Media Based Tactics That Will Have Your Engagement Soaring
Now you’ve identified the problem, it’s time to start fixing it. Below are 6 growth-strategy focused engagement tricks that every successful marketer needs to know about as they continue to create social content post-pandemic.
Know Your Demographic
The first stride towards boosting your social engagement is to take a step back and conduct more research about your demographic. This can be a long and scary process as with over 4.4 billion users and growing, the online audience scope is the largest in the world.
The key here is to narrow down your targeting group. Conduct an audit of the audience you currently have and start narrowing it down from there. Focus on the age range, specific platform engagement and demographic trends within your niche.
As you can see here, platforms such as Facebook and YouTube are identified as the sites with the highest consumer engagement, but before you start creating Facebook Ads and YouTube Videos, it’s important to forget general consumer trends and focus on your specific demographic.
If your audience is younger, ranging from around 18-30, the platforms with the highest engagement completely switch, with Snapchat and Instagram taking the front seat. Therefore, by doing simple research into your own demographic’s trends and behaviours, you’re more likely to see a higher rate of engagement when you post content.
Frequency Is Key
While many look in the direction of their content when their engagement is down, it’s easy to forget that the frequency of your post is also a substantial contributor to your engagement and growth-related stats.
In order to boost your engagement, you need to also be actively engaged. This consists of frequently posting content that fits into topical trends and actively engaging with your followers. Why not reply to the top 5 comments on your post? How could you create a brand-related post that links to the news today? These are all questions you should be asking yourself if you want to see your engagement rise.
Create Content That Starts Conversations
Boosting engagement is all about starting conversations. Creating topical, sharable content that can circulate throughout wide demographics is key if you want to spread brand awareness and increase your follower count.
Creating this type of content is rather simple. Simply start asking questions within your post. Whether that’s within the content itself or simply in the caption, give followers a reason to talk about it in the comments.
Better still, why not try newsjacking. Taking pieces of the news and spinning the story into a post that mentions both your brand and a topical event is an easy way to gain wider interaction from followers outside of your niche.
As you can see here, OREO took a topical news story about the Area 51 conspiracy and spun it into a post that mentioned both their brand and the active hashtag that was drawing in wide engagement on Twitter. This started a conversation with not only their followers but a large selection of competitive blue tick brands that only boosted the engagement in the comments.
Consult The ‘Influencers’
Another great way to boost consumer engagement is to increase brand awareness. One of the easiest ways to do this is through influencer collaboration. Influencers are the opinion leaders of the social media generation. Also known as the celebrities of the online world, influencers have a large following and a significant amount of engagement on their content.
In fact, Covid-19 has made influencer marketing more popular than ever before, with studies suggesting that there has been a 75% elevation in engagement on influencer based sponsored content since March 2020.
Therefore, it could be time to consult the influencers if you’re craving that engagement boost.
Smart Scheduling
In order to increase engagement, it’s important to post your content when the global audience is at its most active. Smart scheduling is an easy engagement tactic to incorporate into your strategy that is likely to increase your content metrics.
As you can see above, active periods of engagement can fluctuate depending on the day, but the most active period of time tends to sit around lunchtime, ranging from about 11-2 pm. Why not try scheduling your content at this time for a week and track your engagement analytics.
Get Professional
Last but certainly not least, it’s time to get professional with your content creation skills. Engaging content is the key to gaining interested followers. It’s time to step up that editing game and download that editing software.
Focusing on colourful eye-catching content designs is a great way to make your brand’s platform stand out against competitors. Use simple but effective fonts and colours and work a theme into your content design schedule.
Our advice is to keep looking at your competitors and see what works for them. Each niche demographic requires a different content style, so it’s important to do your research before completely changing up your theme.
Brighten up your platform’s feed, and watch the engagement begin to climb.