Social media has emerged as one of the most effective communication channels for the brands. These platforms do not only let you send your message to the masses but also give you an idea about your reach right away. Well, yes that is something that was missing in mass media. If the brands are still not analyzing, studying and considering their reach, what’s the whole point of it?

So, first, let us figure out what counts to good social media engagement?
Social media engagement is when your audience is interacting with your account. This happens in terms of:

• Likes
• Follows
• Shares
• Comments
• Retweets
• Click-through

So, huge Social Media Engagement means your audience knows, likes, and trusts your brand and eventually helps in generating more leads and sales. These indexes help you access your brand’s positioning among the audience and analyze the effectiveness of your social media campaigns. If you had been missing onto this crucial aspect of user engagement on social media, then you had been missing onto a lot. It is time to take control of your and devise the best strategies to garner maximum social media engagement.

Many companies have worked on these lines to increase interaction with their present and potential customers to stay at the top of the game. Brands like Netflix, Zomato, Durex and Nike etc are so frequent with their social media posts. They are very prompt with their responses as well which has resulted in improved customer service, better communication with customers, and increased reach among the audience and build positive brand image.

All these factors, help the audience build trust in your brand and service. This eventually drives more traffic to the website and opens new avenues of income and sales. Let us help you play around with a few tips that can help you increase social media engagement with your brand:

1. Devise your social media strategy

The way Nike operates its social media account is totally different then what Wendy’s do. However, both have a very high rate of successful social media engagement which is doing well for its brand. So, there is no right or wrong strategy. You just have to let your social media account a reflection of what your business does and how you can use it to increase your engagement and eventually sales.

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So, if your brand is into academics then your social media posts can talk about various facts on different subjects, if you are into fitness you can be sharing different health tips on your portal.
The idea is to work on a strategy and know how it is going to benefit you.

Some more examples of good social media engagement goals:

• Getting feedback about products or campaigns
• Offer customer support
• Finding and nurturing leads
• Providing information to the customers related to the industry
• Post funny and witty content for more engagement
• Changing brand perception

2. Be witty with your posts

One essentially important feature for a brand’s social media account is to be funny. Yes, it works all the time. As the audience is not going to support or spread your promotional content. They are on social media to get entertained not get told about. So, promotional content is not to work but what is going to get you those likes, shares and comments is witty posts. These could be funny images with relatable captions, sarcastic take on current industry situation and funny memes or puns on the social condition which your audience can relate to. This could be in the form of images, captions and puns anything but sales content.

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3. Go for Visual content

As per various studies were done in the field, it has been proven that the audience is more likely to engage with content which is in the form of an image. As pictures draw more attention and audience is less likely to pass through interesting visual posts. You can share images with some interesting facts related to your industry, useful tip for your target audience, use videos to convey the message, run contests on social media, and use an interesting and eye-catching image with a god caption. While playing around with these images just make sure to meet the technical standards of the respective social media platform. This means to come up with content and images that are best suited for the platform and that will mean more success.

4. Be smart with the timing of your Posts

Your users are not online always and if you want maximum attention then you have to approach them at the right time. This means you should schedule your posts to go at a time when the maximum numbers of people are active. Otherwise, you could potentially lose out on engagement opportunities and your post will be lost within a few hours.

Timing_Management

The best times to post can differ for different social media channels. So you might have to run a few tests on customer’s engagement, demographic and lifestyle to know timing works best for you for each platform. For example, as per various studies, it has been concluded that facebook users are more active between 1 PM and 4 PM, Twitter users around 12-3PM during and Instagram users during 8-9AM. Use this information smartly and schedule your posts to go up at the right time.

5. Start Using Trending Hashtags

While your posts may have a good reach among your audience, these hashtags can help you reach people who aren’t following you. When you use relevant and trending hashtags in your Twitter and Instagram posts, your target audience is more likely to bump in your content.

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You can use the latest hashtag trends and find a way out into your relevant users’ account, which can dramatically increase social media engagement. For example, there may be seasonally trending hashtags such as #NewYear, #WorldCup, #Diwali, #fitness2019, etc.

You can even Come up with a unique, branded hashtag and start your own trend. Follow that with some interesting contests and prices to encourage customers to create relevant posts using the said hashtag. The goal is to get the hashtag to trend so that other users who aren’t already within your follower base can discover you.

6. Giveaway contests

This is one easy way to get the people talking about your brand on social media as they have something to gain from it. What you can do is launch an online contest and offer something nice as the prize. The customer can participate in that either by liking, sharing or commenting on the posts, or it could be through tagging a friend or posting their own content with the said hashtag. Offer your customers a discount or a freebie for a share or retweet, and you’ll see your post spread within seconds. These are an interesting way to get people talking about your brand and works for all social media channels.

7. Using Influencers to Share Content

Social media platforms have a huge reach among the youth and have become a very renowned platform for marketing. Thank these influencers who changed the way marketing works. Now, we have influencers working in different niches like food, fashion, health fitness and tech. Influencer marketing has grown steadily in popularity over the past few years, and for good reason — oftentimes, customers trust influencers over celebrities when choosing which products to buy, or which brands to endorse.
Using_Influencers_to_Share_Content

You can ask famous bloggers or social media influencers in your area of expertise to promote your social media posts in return for a freebie or money is good for getting your brand seen by your prospective customers through a trusted, familiar face. This could encourage their followers to engage with your brand and content.

8. Make Your Customers Feel Engaged

The idea is not just to feel engaged, but to make your customers feel engaged to. This means that the customer should get the prompt and direct response from your account so they feel engaged. As it has been said, “People trust people more than they trust faceless, corporate brands.”
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So, respond to every customer post or comment that they leave.
May brands are playing on the same strategy as:
• Mcdonald’s show how far they take customer engagement with many of their tweets being responses to customer posts.
• Nike has an entire Twitter account dedicated to answering questions and providing customer support.
• Wendy’s responds to almost each and every comment on its social media posts

This is great for ensuring each customer feels like they are valued by the business.
Also, make sure to personalize your Engagement with the users. This can be done by directly addressing each user or tagging them in the reply.

By addressing customer’s concerns and greeting them personally with their name makes them feel like it is a friendly relationship. Signing off the employees’ name in the reply brings a face and customers feel they are in a more personal relationship. This gives your account more of a human persona than that of corporate.

To conclude, Social media engagement cannot be attained overnight. It is a long and continuous process in which you will need to keep thriving to stay at the top of the game. You will need to stay updated with the current scenario, be very prompt, consistent and frequent with your posts. The whole campaign has to be strategized, planned and executed in a very detailed manner. But let’s just say you have to begin somewhere so these effective tips and put your social media strategy to action. If you lack the expertise for that, then you can always get in touch with our team. We would love to be of help to you and your brand.