Social media engagement evaluates the performance of an online business’ platform by measuring the amount of likes, shares, and comments from the public. The more likes, comments, and shares you get toward a post, the more visible your business is.
Although some businesses receive a higher engagement, it doesn’t directly correlate to more sales. So what is the importance of having a social media engagement strategy and how can you use it for your business?
The Importance of Social Media Engagement
The three most popular social media sites are Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Each platform has its own personalizations that businesses can use to measure engagement:
- Facebook: Likes, comments, shares and followers
- Instagram: Likes, comments and followers
- Twitter: Likes, retweets, replies and followers
Shares, likes, comments, and retweets are good for many reasons; shared content reaches more users that have mutual followings, provide insight on how products and services are doing and create a general reputation for a brand.
Though most social media engagement is positive, it’s only as good as the reputation your business displays and interacts with. Posting the wrong content in the wake of an unforeseen event or unpopular opinion could negatively affect your business and could prove to be unshakable moving forward.
Best Practices to Engage with Users
There are ways to ensure that businesses are engaging with their users in an appropriate way. Some of the best practices for social media engagement strategy include:
Quality Over Quantity: Having fun and interesting content including quotes, behind the scenes and keeping up with social media trends can keep a brand at the top of people’s newsfeeds and keeps them visible for existing and potential customers. The more engaging your content is, the more likely they will be shared and your brand will be recognized. Frequent posts throughout the day can create a lot of clutter on a newsfeed and make it less enticing for the user to view; so more is not always better.
Use Images: Your content has to attract your followers, and pictures speak louder than words! Research shows that images increase interaction rates for all social media platforms and with more of these platforms enabling photo uploads, you can showcase your business’ services easily and effectively.
Monitor: There are many social media marketing apps that can track the number of shares, likes, retweets, and comments you get within a given post. Sites like Hootsuite provide businesses insight to see how people are talking about your business and who’s seeing them. From here, you are able to directly engage with users across all social media platforms.
Listen: If monitoring and posting daily seem to be too tough, the best way is to listen. Your social media engagement strategy should be a two-way street. As a business owner, you should be able to hear what reluctant users are saying and respond to the criticism in a constructive way. Don’t leave an automatic comment for each disgruntled user, but address the situation directly and work toward solving the issue if they are valid. Replying to customers could be used for positive reviews as well!
Be Authentic: Nowadays, people are more vocal about wanting to see the brand in full transparency. If you’re not who you claim to be, people will want to take their business elsewhere. Make sure that your brand matches your goals and values and talk to users in a conversational way; never transactional. Followers love to see the real people behind the brand!
Start On Your Social Media Engagement Strategy
Creating a proper social media engagement strategy using our Social Media Marketing service is one of the most affordable and effective marketing methods for your brand to utilize. However, finding the right content that’s worth publishing, while fitting the aesthetic of your brand might be a bit tedious.
Out of Dust Marketing is a social media marketing company in Jacksonville, Florida that helps organizations, businesses, and public figures share their stories and market them to their social media platforms using an effective social media engagement strategy plan and so much more!
For all your social media needs, contact our team at Out of Dust Marketing and Communications by visiting our CONTACT PAGE or by phone: 904-775-2957. Visit our blog for more helpful social media engagement strategy tips to boost your brand.