As a business owner, engagement with your audience is one of the most important components you can focus on this year. You’ve probably stared at your social posts once or twice before and wondered why isn’t anyone looking at them? Especially early in your business when your brand is still growing and gaining momentum. Well, it’s time to take charge of your social media and put a little elbow grease into your content. Because without user engagement, your brand could fall into the forgotten zone of the internet, and that’s never good.
Let’s bring your business back to 2022 with everything you need to make engagement a priority for your brand. Though it takes a little work, your brand and audience will appreciate the thoughtfulness.
What is Social Media Engagement?
Social media engagement is a measure of how people interact with your social media accounts and content while looking at items like comments, likes, and shares, to name a few.
Of course, you want to rack up your followers, but ultimately, the most significant measure of social media success is an engaged audience, not just a big one.
As a business, it’s quality, not just quantity, that you should be striving for. Social media has capitalized on views and the amount of time people spend looking at something in the past. Don’t get me wrong, they still do, but these factors don’t hold nearly as much weight as they used to. Now, algorithms are relying on engagement to demonstrate a brand’s credibility.
Types of Social Media Engagement
Depending on your overall business objectives and content marketing strategy, there are various types of engagement that you can monitor on your social media to give you metrics. It’s essential to keep these items in mind to see where your return on investment lies. When trying to convince your client about the value of engagement, you may hear, “It’s not about engagement anymore. It is about ROI!” They do not realize that content quality directly impacts your social media ROI. Along with ROI, you can get a read of what content is and isn’t working for your audience. Then, you can trim the fat.
- Likes on posts
- Shares of posts
- Comments on posts
- Replies on posts
- Tags of people in your posts
- Mentions of you in other’s posts by tagging you
- How many opened a link you shared
- How many watched a video you shared
Why Engagement is Important
Platforms like Facebook and Instagram are a means of helping you build a relationship with your customers. Every time a customer interacts with your social media posts, they are interested in what you have to say. Better social media engagement means your customers have a stronger relationship with your brand. This, in turn, provides you with more opportunities to build brand loyalty, increase word-of-mouth referrals, and increase sales.
Engagement affects the visibility of your content
Often, a business’s main goal on social media is to increase its brand awareness. Businesses often dismiss engagement, saying that reach is way more important, but they don’t realize how engagement affects the visibility of their content. When it comes to social media content, you need to think of your audience first.
Ask yourself: “What would my community want to share with their friends and family?
Engagement can tell you how well your content resonates with your audience
If your goal is to build a relationship with your audience, you should consider engagement. For example, Facebook’s news feed aims to show people the most relevant stories. Facebook identifies which content your audience is interested in depending on whether or not they engage with it.
If your content doesn’t resonate with your audience, they may hide your post, report it as spam or even hide all your content from their page. That’s why it’s crucial to look at your engagement versus your competitors. By benchmarking their performance, you can determine which content resonates better.
How to Get More Social Media Engagement
Now that you understand how critical social media engagement is, let’s discuss/walk through how to achieve more engagement. Please keep in mind that building engagement takes time; it’s not overnight and is a process that requires strategy. By implementing the following best practices, you’ll be well on your way to generating more engagement, partnerships, and business on your socials.
Create a Content Marketing Strategy
Creating a content marketing strategy should be your first step. This is your blueprint and a marketer’s bible for business. Hiring an expert to design a marketing strategy for your B2B is an excellent solution if you don’t have the time or staff. A well-planned strategy will help you establish your overall content marketing goals, including social media marketing. Essentially, it’s your roadmap. Content marketing is vast and incorporates various mediums such as articles, podcasts, videos, infographics, etc. All of these contribute to the success of your social media engagement.
Create Quality Social Media Content
Producing quality content is the holy grail of your content marketing strategy and, in turn, determines the overall success of your social media engagement. Focus on creating relevant, amusing, and engaging content for your specific audience. This can be done by offering solutions, entertainment, or education. From there, analyze which content gets the most response. For example, if articles on LinkedIn or Facebook posts receive the most positive engagement, invest time in those. Also, consider adding humor to your content to increase engagement. Humor, especially on platforms like Twitter, can generate high engagement.
Be Active on Social Media
One of the worst things you could do is open a social media account and hardly ever use it. Posting once a month will not yield a lot of engagement and give the impression that your business is closed. Remember, social media is constantly cycling. So you need to be on your A-game and post on a regular basis. It can be overwhelming to consistently post on social media, especially on several different platforms. A solution to this is having a social media schedule or using a social media management service such as TC Creatives.
Monitor Your Social Media Metrics
Remember, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. By analyzing your audience data, you can see if you’re on track with your social media goals. You can use the data to understand what content your audience responds best to and what content they are not interested in. You can craft a new strategy and cater to their wants and needs. Most social media sites provide analytics tools that help you see what’s working and what’s not. These tools provide insight into key metrics such as likes, shares, comments, etc. The analytics pages also feature graphs that are easy to read and show you the overall success of your social media marketing strategy.
Conclusion
Without engagement, social media is just media. People don’t use social networks for a one-way experience. They’re seeking connections — with people and with brands. What started as a way for people to hang out with their friends online has turned into a place where brands can engage in meaningful conversations and turn those conversations into followers and customers. Successful social media engagement significantly impacts small businesses, affecting everything from brand awareness to customer loyalty.
What does all of this mean for your small business? Simply put, social media engagement is more critical than ever. It’s no longer enough to post random content and hope people will like, share, or comment on it. You need to be proactive in engaging with your audience to see real results. Luckily, our team at TC Creatives can help. We offer a wide range of services designed to increase your social media engagement and help you reach your business goals. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you get more out of your social media channels.
