Our Top 7 Tips for Engagement on Social Media
Once you’ve established a few social media accounts, it’s easy to presume that engagement will just come naturally. Yet you’ve had your channels for a few months and you are wondering why no one is commenting or liking any of your posts. Why is that? It’s important to actively encourage engagement, and to make sure you are making the most of your business channels. Here are our top 7 tips for increasing online engagement:
1) Post regular content
You’ve got to be consistent online. If you do a ‘tip of the week’, you need to do it every week, not just when you remember. Make sure you regularly post helpful and interesting content. Ask yourself, how does this content benefit my audience? How is it valuable? Switch it up across your networks too – if you share the same link twice, introduce it in different ways. Repetition is boring.
2) Create engagement with others
How can you expect anyone to engage with you if you don’t engage with anyone else? Now, this may be the sort of thing your parents would teach you not to do, (“don’t do something just to get something in return”), but hey, this is business, and in business you need to give to get. Like and Follow similar pages to you, retweet material you like and comment and share information. Show that you are a person, not just a page, and be prepared to follow others and build up an online network with strangers. It starts with you.
3) Join local business networks
This is another great way to let your business be heard and to meet other online professionals. Local business networks help you see your competition and also what fresh opportunities are out there for you. For instance, a ‘Twitter Tuesday’ forum might help you get a new band of enthusiastic followers. Get searching to discover what’s out there, and don’t be afraid to get involved.
4) Encourage user-generated content
This can be a bit tricky but will work wonders for your engagement levels. Creating more user-generated content makes the user feel valued and helps you demonstrate a good client/business relationship online. Asking people to share images or to design a new logo to help celebrate Children in Need makes the user feel important while your engagement figures rocket.
5) Use call to actions
Unfortunately, just asking people to share your content doesn’t really work. You have to make them want to – why should they engage? Call to actions work really well as they are a subtle way of prompting engagement. For instance, creating a sense of urgency often panics people into engagement, such as: ‘Last day to receive a free bag of our spicy meatballs if you sign up to our newsletter NOW’. Using different fonts can help emphasise certain words, increasing pressure. It’s important to make the benefit clear – how will the customer gain from responding to your call to action?
6) Keep it visual
Images and videos are everything on social media. Keep them clear, professional and high-res to attract customers. Take your own pictures and share others, just remember to always credit photos online. For your own work it is important to only use legally sourced free images – check out our advice on how to source images online without getting into a legal battle.
7) Run competitions/polls
Who doesn’t love a good prize? Get people excited with competitions and prizes, requesting engagement in return for a chance to win that fancy coffee blender or trip to Barcelona. Polls are a great way to find out what your audience likes, doesn’t like, and wants to happen. You can use the results to better your social media in the future.
So there you have it – 7 useful ways you can boost your engagement online. The key thing to remember about social media is that it is meant to be social. That means it’s a two way conversation, and that requires effort and engagement on your part too. Keep it exciting, fresh and professional and you’ll be teaming with engagement in no time. Just don’t forget to keep up the good work.
