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Is your social media page a community for social interaction or just another marketing channel? If you aren’t seeing much growth on your social channel, then you may be focusing too much on your marketing strategies and not enough on the social aspect of social media.Your social media accounts should be social first... and with that truth on the table, engagement is the primary metric for measuring success.Learn how to use social media engagement to measure your growth and tips for creating more engaging content that complements your other marketing strategies.
Engagement adds the social aspect to media content. Without engagement, social media would be no different than other online content.Most consumers follow brands on social media. About 90% of Instagram users, for instance, follow brand accounts. Each follower is a new opportunity for your brand to build a consumer relationship through engagement. When you invest in the social aspect of social media, you will build greater trust with your customers and see a higher conversion rate.Some examples of social media engagement include:
Social media are sites for connecting and interacting with others, making your engagement the most important metric for measuring your social media success. An excellent social media strategy will put the social aspect at the forefront of your strategies.When people follow brands on social media, they aren’t just looking for a good deal. They want to build a relationship with that brand while engaging with personable and customized content.Social media engagement is even more critical today because social platforms are flooded with content. On Facebook alone, over one billion stories are published daily. Because of the large amount of new content, organic social media strategies aren’t as effective as in the past.One of the only exceptions to this shift is engagement. Pages with high engagement still rank well in searches and have a broad reach, despite the overwhelming amount of competing content. If you want to succeed in social media marketing in 2022, you must start with building up your engagement.
Your engagement rate is one of your most important social media metrics to track. Here are three reasons you should monitor and analyze your engagement.
Unfortunately, not everything on social media is reliable. For instance, Facebook removes between one and two billion fake accounts each quarter. If you based your social media growth on followers alone, you might not have an accurate picture of how well your business is succeeding.Your engagement rate will give you a more precise glimpse into how many new active followers you have. If your follower count stays the same, but your engagement increases because more people are commenting and sharing your content, you are growing.
You can measure how well your social media posts and campaigns performed by your engagement rate. To know whether your content is successful, compare the engagement to your total follower count. If your business page has ten thousand followers, but you are only getting a few dozen interactions, your content isn’t resonating with your followers or bringing in the right followers.Use your engagement rate to optimize your content by creating more of the content that gets high engagement while reworking content that didn’t perform well.
How, when, and why your audience engages with your content will give you a sneak peek into your followers. Their comments and interactions will tell you what they like, what they want to see more of, or their current pain points.Those insights are valuable for creating targeted content that will likely resonate with your audience. For instance, if a follower asks a question like, “Can I use your product for XYZ?” You can use that interaction for inspiration when creating future content.
You could use dozens of metrics on social media to measure your engagement. Instead of getting overwhelmed with numbers, focus on these most impactful metrics.
Count your post interactions, including likes, comments, and shares. This metric gives you a general idea of your engagement per post. In addition, you can use this metric to follow how your posts increase overall engagement and see fluctuations to identify popular posts, best times to post, and the most effective content types.
You can find your engagement rate by dividing the number of post interactions by total impressions. Your impressions are the people who see your content. This percentage gives you better insights into the performance of your post. If you have a high engagement rate, most people who saw your post found it relevant.
If you divide your post interactions by your total followers, you can see what percentage of your followers interact with your post. If only a handful of followers like your post, you should adjust your content to resonate better with your audience.
When someone tags your account or uses a hashtag you created without any promise of a reward, it is organic engagement. Because they take place outside of your social media page, they indicate positive brand reach. The more organic mentions you receive, the greater your reach is.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Looking for more insights to boost your social media engagement?
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These five social media engagement strategies will take your content to the next level and increase your engagement rate and organic mentions.
If you want people to stop long enough to interact with your content, it must catch their eye. People’s attention span on social media is only a few seconds, so you need to make your content engaging and different.Some of the best-performing media types on social platforms are videos. You can also use images, bold fonts, and bright colors to draw the eye to your message. Pictures see twice the engagement rate, and video sees five times the average engagement rate.After catching their eye, hold their attention by keeping your message short and simple. Some of the best performing content evokes emotions like laughter, sadness, or empathy. Storytelling is a powerful tool in content marketing and often brings out emotions that encourage interactions.
Image from Smart Insights
If your content provides value, your viewers are more likely to interact and share the content. For instance, your post or video could educate your viewers about your industry.Avoid only using your content to promote your brand and products. If you spend too much time on promotions and not enough on other value areas, you will lose followers. Instead, attract followers with valuable and creative content. Then once you build a trusting relationship, you can discuss some of your products.
An effective social media response strategy for increasing your engagement is giving an action for your audience to perform.Your action might simply be responding to a question like, “What is your experience with XYZ??” Since people love talking about themselves, many of your followers will enjoy adding their own stories to the post.You might also have an activity for them to complete, like following an account for a chance to win a reward or participating in a hashtag campaign.
If you aren’t getting a significant engagement rate, evaluate how easy your posts are to engage with. Have several of your marketing team perform tasks like following, liking, commenting, and sharing your content to see how user-friendly your content is.Increasing your engagement rate might be as simple as making engagement actions more prominent. For instance, brands on YouTube will often end their videos with a direct link on the screen to the subscribe button to make the process as easy as possible and ensure viewers perform it before they move on to the following video.Posting links, giving verbal reminders, and providing written reminders within your content are all successful social media tactics for making engagement easy.
Because of the large amount of content on social media, organic engagement isn’t as easy to generate as in previous years. As a result, paid media is rising to encourage more interactions. However, brands have found ways to continue bringing in organic interactions by increasing the amount they post to ensure their audience regularly sees their content.The average number of posts per week across all industries on Facebook is 5.87 times. On Instagram, the average number of posts per week across industries is 4.55 but engagement levels are far higher. Brands that post one to two times a day saw the best organic engagement. And we haven't even begun to discuss TikTok, where it is recommended to post at least 1-4 times per day... and this is probably the future of organic success across all platforms. Organic social media is all about conversations and relationships and they need to be nurtured daily to flourish.
Image from RivalIQ
Has your social media engagement grown stagnant? That might indicate that your strategies are outdated or missing key elements to encourage audience interactions.Start by incorporating more media variety, streamlining engagement actions, and updating your posting strategy. We can help you customize your new plan to reach your business goals and see better growth.Contact our social media experts to create an updated social media strategy.
As Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) @ Kubbco, I lead the global strategic efforts and oversee the research and planning, community, content strategy and paid social teams.
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