Social media engagement is an important metric to consider when building an online presence for your business. While most want to increase the size of their audience, they often fail to increase their social media engagement as well. The time you devote to engaging with your audience and building relationships with your customers can lead to an increase in sales, customer loyalty, and higher positive reviews. In this blog, you’ll learn the importance of social media engagement and ways you can increase social media engagement instantly.

Why is social media engagement so important?

Social media engagement helps strengthen the relationship you have with your customers. When customers engage with your posts or send you a message on social media, you’re given an opportunity to get to know your customers, their wants and needs and a chance to build a relationship with them. It's up to you to, in fact it's your responsibility to, go above and beyond for your audience and offer excellent customer service.

Social media engagement also allows you to build customer loyalty. By helping your customers when they’re in need, building a relationship with them and offering a unique kind customer experience, you’ll see your customer loyalty skyrocket. This builds trust in your brand because you’ve answered their questions and highlighted how important your customers are to you. Add that personal touch every customer likes and appreciates. Let them fall in love with your brand because you’ve joked around with them, expressed your gratitude for their custom, and resolved the problems they brought to light.

You’ll also increase your sales through social media engagement. How? By being active on social media and responding to customer posts and comments, customers will feel confident making a purchase through your online store. Even if there are negative comments on your page, if you respond positively and resolve the issue instantly, you’ll still see a growth in your sales.

Top tips for increasing your social media engagement

Now you know why it's so important, here are our top tips to increase your social media engagement:

1. Post content worth engaging with

Sounds obvious, right? But if you want to increase social media engagement, you need to create content that your audience will engage with. It can be anything - a poll on Instagram, a video people can relate to, or a product photo that encourages someone to tag their friends. Choose to post content that will receive a positive reaction from the people you want to see it. Think about whether your post is beautiful, inspiring, funny, or relatable? Only choose content that’ll drive somewhat of an emotional response from your target audience.

2. Respond to all comments

Believe it or not, to increase social media engagement, you need to be social too. When customers send you a message or leave a comment on a post, they’re giving you an opportunity to interact with them. Whether they leave a positive or negative message, you should be responding to each and every person. This is a great way to show appreciation for positive messages and suggest a resolution for negative ones.

3. Use images in every post

Today, it’s visual pieces of content that garner the most views, likes, shares, and comments. According to MDG Advertising, images on Facebook receive 20% more engagement than videos and 352% more engagement than links. Images capture more attention when scrolling through newsfeeds than just plain old text and adding relevant imagery to your post will help encourage more engagement.

4. Encourage readers to like, comment, share and save

When you create a post, no matter what platform it is on, always add a call to action at the end of it. You can ask people to like, comment, and share with their friends or even ask them to visit your site using a link in the post or in the bio. NOTE: people are more likely to share a post if they're asked.

5. Run contests and giveaways

The easiest way you can increase social media engagement is to run contests and giveaways your customers will love. You can ask people to take certain actions such as liking the post and tagging their friends or visiting a landing page on your website. There are platforms like Rafflecopter you can use to host these contests or giveaways. You’ll need to give a prize to a winner but the prize can be expensed by your business.

6. Use attention grabbing words at the beginning of a post

When you use two important words before a post, you receive higher engagement rates. For example, if you're was running a giveaway or contest, you should be using terms such as ‘GIVEAWAY ALERT’ or 'COMPETITION TIME' to grab their interest.

7. Post multiple times daily

To increase social media engagement, we advise you to post regularly on all your pages. We've found, on average, 2 or 3 posts per platform per day will help you build an engaged audience. However, if you post too much, you may annoy your audience so be careful. Posting too much and annoying your audience can result in unfollowers, which is obviously the opposite of what you want. 

You also need to consider the times in which you post your content. If you audience is mainly UK based, on average, between 1-3pm is the best time to post on your social media accounts. You can test and measure what times best suit you and what gets more engagement from your audience. You can also use metrics in- built in different platforms. For example if you have a professional account on Instagram, the platform provides you with insights that you can utilise when it comes to posting at the right times of the day for your audience to engage.

8. Get more followers

Having followers will of course help you increase social media engagement. Accounts with under 100 followers will receive less engagement overall than brands with tens of thousands. Social media engagement is somewhat a numbers game. What I mean by this is that, the bigger the audience, the more people you're reaching and the higher level of engagement you have. NOTE: you’ll still need to ensure that the quality of your social media posts is top level, but it’s a lot easier to receive engagement on your post when you have a bigger audience.

9. Only share content that’s relevant to your audience

This is where you ask yourself some very important questions. Who are your customers? What are they interested in? What types of posts do they interact with? Do they prefer videos or image posts on social media?

So it's up to you to focus on creating content your customer enjoy every single day. Again, it's test and measure - you’ll likely need to experiment with different types of content to see which gets the most engagement from your audience. If you notice that videos perform well on your accounts, then create more video content.