Information in this blog was obtained from HubSpot, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social.
Have you ever wondered how brands interact with customers and keep their following up? Do you have a growing business and want to know how to increase your engagement and your brand awareness? Improving and optimizing your social media accounts and staying engaged with your client base is the best way to get started. Keep reading for more information and tips to get your name out there and make your business known.
First, let’s talk about what engagement is. Engagement is when your audience is actively engaging with your posts and content. The amount of interaction on individual posts (or your account in general) in comparison to your reach and the number of followers you have. There are plenty of free tools you can utilize to calculate your engagement rate as well as you calculating it on your own. For social media marketing, a good engagement rate is anywhere between 1 and 5%. Knowing what your engagement is can help you learn more about your audience, create better social media strategies, and implement them successfully over and over. Going back to see what kinds of posts worked the best and figuring out which audience members engage with your content the most will give you a good idea of what next steps you should take. The higher your engagement, the better visibility you will have on social media platforms.
Building a social media plan is a great blueprint for delivering high-quality, relevant content that your audience will appreciate, establishing trust with your brand, and driving business to you. A good social media plan should include realistic social media marketing goals, determining how to measure the success of your efforts, and utilizing trends and best practices in your strategies. Diversifying your content is another great thing you can learn from creating a social media plan. The first thing you want to do is to set goals you have for your brand. Some of these goals can include raising your brand awareness, driving traffic to your website, generating new leads, building an online community, and much more.
Once you figure out what your goals are, you can begin to curate content that will help you achieve those goals. Listing any challenges you face with your social media marketing is another useful tip for figuring out what works best. If you can determine what roadblocks you are facing, it is that much easier to begin working towards solutions. Running a competitive analysis is the next best step to take when figuring out your marketing goals. Knowing what your competitors are doing that works is a good way to come up with an answer to your own brand’s challenges. Remember: you do not want to directly mimic what your competitors are doing; customers can usually pick up on this kind of thing, so it is best to use this as a step towards coming up with your own plan.
Conducting a SWOT analysis on your own brand is always a good idea as well. Especially writing out your own strengths and weaknesses will really help you to see what areas are doing great and which ones could use some improvement. This also gives you a good chance to see what opportunities you have available and what threats your brand could potentially be facing. Running a social media audit can also be very beneficial to your brand in the long run. It helps you see what content performs the best and gives you a chance to figure out why something is or is not working. If your posts are not engaging enough, you know your strategy needs a changeup.
Posting and staying consistent is one of the best ways to keep your audience interested. You need to create an online persona for your brand and keep it consistent among all your social media channels. Speaking of consistency, optimizing and keeping your social media profiles aligned with the persona you’ve created is a great way to create the authenticity your audience is after. Your profile picture should stay the same among all your accounts and ensuring you fill out every section of your profile is the best way to get people to stay on your profile. If there is no interesting content on your profile telling your followers what your brand is all about, they might not care enough to do the research into you and your brand. Letting them know what you have to offer and who you are at the top of your profile could be the deciding factor for some customers.
Developing a buyer persona and listening to what your audience wants is another great way to boost your engagement and your following. Customers like knowing that a brand is listening to their thoughts and input when it comes to social media strategy. When in doubt, ask your audience. They appreciate a brand that is open to customer suggestions and it may even help you gain some new followers in the process.
Staying up to date is crucial in the social media marketing world. If you want people to interact with your posts, you need to make sure you know what the current trends and topics are. If you try to hop on a TikTok challenge that was trending two weeks ago, you will still get some engagement, but for optimal results, it is best to participate in these things when they first start trending.
The type of content you are posting can also make a difference in the amount of interaction you receive. Looking back at past posts and content types, figure out which ones perform the best, so you know which ones you want to incorporate into your strategy. Once you know which ones perform the best, invest more into those ones and less into the ones that don’t. You can use paid advertising to push your best-performing content to a specific audience. The content types you can use include:
Memes
GIFs
Infographics
How-tos
Polls
Contests
User-generated content
Photo/video
Live streaming
Audio
This is where knowing your audience and what they like comes in handy. You want to use a variety of different content types, but you don’t necessarily have to use all of the ones listed. Changing it up is great for keeping your audience interested and coming back for more. If it gets too repetitive, your audience is eventually going to lose interest and possibly even unfollow you completely. The next thing to do is figure out how often to post. Both posting too much and posting too little can be detrimental to your following, so ensuring you have a good posting schedule to go off of will be beneficial. Each platform has different specifications for what is an ideal posting amount which includes:
TikTok: 1-4 times per day
Instagram: 1-2 times per day
Facebook: 4-5 times per day
LinkedIn: Once per day
Twitter: 3-4 times per day
Pinterest: Once per day
While these are just general guidelines, sticking to a regular posting schedule is the best way to increase brand awareness and get new followers. Try experimenting with different times of the day to see what works best for you.
Engaging with and responding to your audience is important and a great way to build trust and authenticity with your customer base. This and reading through comments are good for when you are looking for feedback and/or more ideas for future content. Another way to engage is by asking questions that have a call-to-action behind them. For example, an Instagram photo with the caption “double tap if you’ve been there” or “tell us what you think in the comments” is perfect for increasing engagement. If the prompt is there, the customer is much more likely to follow through with it rather than just scroll by. Using hashtags and relevant emojis will also help with adding personality to your posts and making your content seem more relatable. Do your research into what hashtags are currently trending and use the top ones that are relevant to your brand.
To finish off, the quality of your content is much more important than the number of followers you have. Yes, your following is important, but if you are just starting out, utilizing some of the ideas mentioned here will help you grow that follower count in no time.
Resources
Forsey, C. (2022, September 1). How to gain your first (or next) 1,000 Instagram followers - 26 tips. HubSpot Blog. Retrieved February 26, 2023, from https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/gain-instagram-followers?hubs_content=blog.hubspot.com%252Fmarketing&hubs_content-cta=blog-nav-card--media-card&hubs_post-cta=blognavcard-marketing
Sehl, K. (2023, February 23). Engagement rate calculator + guide for 2023. Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard. Retrieved February 26, 2023, from https://blog.hootsuite.com/calculate-engagement-rate/
Creating a 30-day Social Media Plan. Sprout Social. (2022, October 26). Retrieved February 26, 2023, from https://sproutsocial.com/insights/templates/social-media-plan/
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