How to Improve Your Business’ Social Media Engagement

Social media often feels like a pure numbers game, one that’s difficult to engineer in your favor. When your social strategy fails to garner a good engagement rate, it’s as if your posts disappear into a hazy sea of content. Often this is met with the notion to post more, do more, say more—but is this how you optimize your approach?

With the right social media management,  your social media can be a powerful business tool that helps you interact with customers, expand your market reach, establish your brand, and ultimately, drive revenue. However, simply posting periodically isn’t good enough to foster audience engagement.

So then, how do you navigate the murky waters of social media?

Grab a compass and some captions; here’s how you can improve your business’s social media engagement.

Starting From Scratch—How to Choose the Right Platforms

You’ve probably heard the old adage, “Craftsmen are only as good as their tools.” In any industry, there are objectives that can only be met using the proper accouterments. These creative tools don’t transfer from one industry (or platform) to another.

In other words, if you’re using the same strategy and posts for LinkedIn as you are on TikTok, your overarching marketing strategy will lack efficacy. Thus, rather than post more—reconsider which platforms and social media for business tips are right for your brand.

To identify which social media platforms are most effective, consider the following questions:

• Do you operate B2B or B2C?
• What are the goals of your social media strategy?
• What are your client demographics?
• Where are they in the sales funnel when they visit your social media platforms?
• Which social media platform does your target consumer use?
• What do your competitors focus on?

Your answers will start to shape the foundational pillars of your social strategy.

For example, a SaaS company that sells to other businesses will derive value from more informational-focused platforms like Linkedin, Twitter, and YouTube. On the other hand, a B2C retail brand will primarily focus on visual-emphasis platforms that have a high degree of virality like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.

You may be tempted to post from every angle, using all the platforms. Beware: this can backfire.

A proper social media strategy—one where you’re coordinating posts, tracking the engagement rate, and then analyzing the data to make thoughtful pivots—takes time. And if you’re spending that time creating more posts that don’t garner likes, shares, and comments, you’re not digging at the root of the problem. Instead, you should be focusing on how to create successful Facebook video ads or ads meant for fewer platforms.

Increase Your Visibility—Understand and Track Your Numbers

Engagement is simply the interaction between the brand and its audience. And those interactions are quantifiable.

So, if you have already established some presence on social media, what are your numbers? You should be keeping track of all social media engagement metrics, such as:

• Shares
• Retweets
• Comments
• Likes
• Subscriptions
• Signups
• Reactions
• Followers and audience growth
• Click-throughs
• Mentions (either tagged or untagged)
• Using branded hashtags
• On-page purchases

It’s difficult to chart and measure engagement growth if you don’t know where your baseline is. Gathering, categorizing, and analyzing this data empowers your team to identify strengths and weaknesses in your overall strategy, which, in turn, can produce actionable insights.

Consider a situation in which a company accumulates millions of impressions, but only tens of likes and comments. In this case, it’s critical to analyze the content—there’s likely a reason users aren’t engaging with it. Alternatively, what about a brand that has great engagement metrics from its target audience, but not enough to meet its  KPIs? This is the best-case scenario—now all that’s left to do is increase the quantity of content, while keeping the quality consistent.

The problem is that most businesses don’t have the bandwidth to track social media engagement metrics. This leaves them with only one strategy: blindly guessing and checking.

Always Lead With Quality—If The Content Doesn’t Provide Value, Toss It

Social media engagement starts (and ends) with quality content. It’s the crux that everything else hinges upon.

So, what is your audience seeking? What do they need to have or hear at this specific point in their journey down the sales funnel?

Your content should be catered to meeting their needs. And you can use an array of different content types to target them, including:

• Blogs, articles, guides – Long-form written content is your opportunity to provide the consumer with useful information that allows you to establish your brand, demonstrate your thought-leadership, improve SEO, and drive traffic to your website. The best social media platforms for this content type include Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
• Images – Especially for B2C businesses, posting images allows your company to show off the products, people, and other elements of your brand. A branding agency can also help you create this type of content. This type of content is engaging, digestible, and fairly easy to create, making it perfect for posting Instagram and Facebook ads.
• Videos – One of the most important mediums in your content arsenal is video—as evidenced by the fact that 93% of consumers said that video made a positive factor in their purchasing decisions and was their favorite type of content from brands on social media.¹ As such, video can be leveraged for a range of purposes, including:
• Product videos
• Q&As
• Behind the scenes
• Live videos
• Stories
• User-generated content
• Reveals
• Giveaways
• How-tos

Currently, the top platforms for video include TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. With that being said though, Facebook can also be a create platform to create videos if you are knowledgeable of Facebook video impressions as well as Facebook video ad metrics.

Communication is a Two-Way Street—Engage with Your Audience

If all you do is post content and then wait to post the next, your audience may recognize that you’re simply “playing the game.” Alternatively, if you communicate with the individuals that reach out to your business, you can create an ongoing dialogue and foster a relationship.

Especially early on, to increase your engagement, you need to be social. With the help of BAM’s internet marketing service, they can provide strategies for responding to comments, sharing user content, and continuing the conversation.

Pay to Play—Leverage Paid Social

Social media ad spending has increased by 400% since 2016, with analysts forecasting a record high of $56.85 billion this year.² This continued increase in marketing investment is demonstrative of the efficacy of paid social.

With paid social, your business is guaranteed to reach targeted, ready-to-buy consumers. It gives you the control to get granular with a potential customer  you seek to reach.

Practically every platform offers multiple paid ad options. For instance, Facebook offers the following ad placements:

• Newsfeed
• Instant articles
• In-stream videos
• Marketplace
• Stories
• Carousel
• Feed
• Stories

Have Fun—Run Contests or Giveaways

One of the simplest ways to increase social media engagement is by running a giveaway. It can help instantly generate buzz around your brand, especially if you apply the following tips:

• Identify a goal – You should have a specific purpose for running a giveaway in addition to driving engagement. For instance, it could be to increase follower count, boost brand awareness, or promote a new product.
• Provide a prize people want – The prize or free product should provide enough appeal or value in order to incentivize engagement. Ideally, it should be related to your business.
• Set the parameters – What are the details surrounding the event? You need to know the timeline, rules, participation requirements, and how the winner will be announced.
• Follow the rules – Practically every platform has site-specific rules regarding promotional activities. For example, you can run a giveaway on Facebook from a group, event, or page, but not from a personal timeline. So, be sure to review and confirm that your activities are aligned before posting.

Consistency is Key—Create a Content Schedule

To foster continuous engagement, you need to be posting on social media regularly. But you don’t want to clog up users’ feeds with too much content. The goal is to find that happy medium.

Similarly, you should try to post at peak hours. Here are some of the peak traffic hours according to the American Marketing Association:³

• Facebook – Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m.
• Instagram – Between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Tuesday, and at 11 a.m. on Monday through Friday
• Twitter – 8 a.m. on Mondays and Thursdays
• LinkedIn – 9 a.m. on Tuesdays and Wednesdays

That said, by testing different times of the day and days of the week, you can find your target audience’s sweet spot.