How to Increase Social Media Business Engagement
Running social media for a small business can be intimidating, and when you have hardly any engagement, it can feel like a waste of time. Why post every week or even every day if no one is listening?
Before we dive into how to increase social media engagement, it’s important to remember why social media is important. Like we talked about in our post, “Why Your Company Should Be On Social Media,” an active social media presence can boost search engine rankings, increase sales and give your amazing insights as to what your audience is actually interested in.
Sound worthwhile? Let’s talk about increasing the engagement levels, then!
1. Be engaging
If you want to increase social media engagement, you need to be engaging. Don’t just post the same old content, hoping that you’ll finally go viral. That’s not the goal. The goal is to form a relationship with your audience and to be someone worth listening to. Here are a few ways to make your content more engaging:
- Post helpful content. If you want customers to listen, give them the information they’re looking for. Share tips from your field of expertise. This will only help to grow your audience and establish your expertise.
- Use a mix of captivating visuals. Posting the same image type is sure to lead to a lack of interest. Instead, mix up your visuals, rotating between high-quality images, quotes, or images with text content, videos, and more.
- Ask questions. Social media isn’t a post-and-forget-it platform. Rather, you should stick around and start conversations by asking questions. You may get no interaction at first, but you’ll never get interactions if you stop asking questions. Over time, as you post interesting content and continue to ask questions, you’ll get some responses. Moreover, you can customize your questions based on the more successful types. (For example, don’t ask yes and no questions. Focus on questions that people will have a strong opinion on or that they’ll resonate with. Even asking chocolate cake versus vanilla is an engaging question!)
2. Engage with others
What better way to increase engagement than to engage with others actively? This is when an active social media account (leaving your profile to start conversations elsewhere) will often surpass a passive account (waiting for people to find your profile). Here are some ways to get started!
- Follow your target audience. Start by following your target audience. Do you serve moms, other businesses, dog owners…? Use hashtags and locations to find the very customer profiles you serve. Follow those accounts and hashtags!
- Comment on posts. Other accounts are asking questions too. Answer their questions. Comment on posts.
- Reply to Instagram stories. Many users are very active on Instagram stories. Responding to stories gets you into their inbox in a low-risk way.
- Have conversations. Once you’re in the inbox of another account, don’t head straight to a sales pitch. Instead, have a conversation. All you want to do is stay top of mind.
Remember that when you engage with other accounts, they’ll often engage right back with you. Users who engage with your account will be more likely to see your content, further resulting in views, followers, and sales. This is why social media engagement is important and why so many business owners become quickly frustrated when the engagement is practically nonexistent.
Following these social media practices will add a personable touch to your brand and prove the usefulness of an active social media account.
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