“Looking to boost your online presence? Discover 10 effective tips for better results on how to increase social media engagement. By implementing strategies like posting at the right times, interacting with your audience and creating shareable content, you can improve your reach and faster stronger connections with your followers. These simple yet powerful techniques will help you master how to increase social media engagement and elevate your brand’s success.”
Table of Contents
10 Tips for how to increase social media engagement
Curious about how to increase social media engagement? Then, check out these seven social media engagement ideas and tips!
Encourage user-generated content
- Reply to your audience
- Ask questions
- Use high-quality visuals
- Post frequently
- Try creating live videos
- Track your social performance
1. Encourage user-generated content
First on our list of ways to improve social media engagement is to encourage user-generated content. User-generated content is content that your audience creates, and you share on your business’s profile. It’s a great social media engagement strategy because it helps you get users to interact with your brand and get their content featured on your profile.
2. Reply to your audience
Replying to your audience is one of the easiest ways to improve social media engagement, but companies often overlook it. Many businesses will post content and leave it at that. This action is a mistake — you want to comment back to your followers and engage them in conversation.
It takes two to have a conversation, so you must spend the time conversing with your audience. If people comment on your content, comment back. Engage in conversation and start a dialogue with your brand.
3. Ask questions
Next on our list of social media engagement ideas is to ask questions. When you post questions as content, you can get your audience to engage more with your business. It creates an easy way for you to get your audience to engage with you on social media.
When you ask questions, make sure you stick to industry and brand-related questions. If you owned a clothing boutique, you wouldn’t ask people if they like chocolate or vanilla milkshakes better. You want to ask questions related to your company so you can get people thinking about your brand and products.
So, for example, if you owned an ice cream shop, asking people if they like chocolate or vanilla milkshakes better would be a great way to get people to interact with your post and share which flavor they like best. It could even encourage people to share a different flavor, which opens a new door for conversation. Asking questions is one of the best social media engagement strategies for getting people to participate.
4. Use high-quality visuals
If you want to know how to increase social media engagement, start by using visuals.
Your followers see content from numerous people, like friends, family, and other businesses. If you want your content to stand out from the rest, you need to use high-quality visuals to catch your audience’s attention. You can use numerous types of visuals in your content, like:
- Photos
- Videos
- Infographics
- GIFs
Sharing visual content will help you catch your audience’s attention and get them to engage with your post. You can use a variety of these visuals to help keep your strategy fresh and keep it interesting for your business. Visuals appeal to people more than a wall of text.
Even if you have text in your post, including a high-quality, high-resolution visual can make the difference in whether someone interacts with your content.
5. Post frequently
Next on our list of tips for how to increase engagement on social media is to post frequently. If you see low engagement with your posts, it may be because people don’t see your content. Like we stated earlier, your followers are seeing content from friends, family, and other businesses.
They see tons of content in their newsfeed, so if you don’t post often, your audience might miss it. To combat this issue, you can use strategies to increase social engagement, like posting content regularly. When you post frequently, you create more opportunities for people to find your content.
It increases the likelihood that you’ll reach your audience and get them to engage with your posts.
6. Try creating live videos
Creating live videos is another one of the ways to improve social media engagement. Live videos enable you to create real-time interactions between you and your audience. It’s a great way to get them to engage with your brand and get to know your business.
When you create live videos, you can make them around any subject. Whether it’s a new product release, a tour of your company, or a Q&A, you create an opportunity for your audience to connect with you directly and learn more about your business. You create a dialogue between you and your audience, which encourages them to engage with your brand in the future.
Social media engagement can be extremely powerful. But with so many platforms, algorithms, trends, and metrics available to marketers, it can also be an elusive beast.
How do you know if your engagement strategy is working? Is there a good way to calculate engagement rate? What can you do to improve your social media engagement?
In this post, we’ll show you key tactics that successful marketing experts have used to plan, calculate, and improve social media engagement so you can try it for yourself.
Key Takeaways
- Engagement is more than just likes. Social media engagement includes everything from likes and comments to shares, saves, DMs, and mentions. It’s a broad measure of how your audience interacts with your content.
- Engagement gives you insights into what your followers like and don’t like. Pay attention to comments and messages you receive — they can show you what your audience wants more of.
- Engagement is a two-way street. Don’t just post and disappear! Respond to comments and start conversations. Engaging with your audience helps build stronger relationships and encourages more interaction with your posts.
How to measure your social media engagement
Once your comments and shares are flying, it’s time to crunch some numbers to see exactly how your content is performing.
But not everyone’s a mathematician, and knowing how to track your social media engagement can be a bit of a head-scratcher. Luckily, Hootsuite’s got your back. Here are a couple of tools you can use to measure your social engagement.
Free social media engagement rate calculator
You can use our engagement rate calculator below to figure out your engagement rate by post. Or, skip to the next section to learn how Hootsuite Analytics can give you the nitty-gritty details.
- Number of followers
- Number of posts
- Comments
- Shares
- Likes
- Saves
- Clicks
- DMs
- Calculate now
PSA: If you’re calculating your social media account’s total engagement, include information about all your posts (e.g., total number of posts published, total number of likes, and so on).
If you’re calculating the engagement rate of a specific campaign, only include the details of the social media posts that were part of the campaign.
Hootsuite Analytics
Engagement metrics can be tricky. If you’re calculating by follower count, remember that not all of your followers will have seen your post. Plus, people who don’t follow you may have also interacted with your post.
And, for larger followings or marketers with multiple social accounts, calculating everything manually or using spreadsheets can get a little swampy. Luckily, Hootsuite Analytics can help.
Hootsuite Analytics lets you easily track the performance of all your social media channels in one place (so you can replicate what works and get more engagement). The tool collects your stats from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok.
With Hootsuite Analytics, you can also:
- Find out when your audience is online
- Get personalized recommendations for the best times to post for each of your accounts
- Easily view industry benchmarks and see how you compare to competitors
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6. Study your metrics
It’s hard to measure your engagement growth if you don’t know where you’re starting from.
Put on your data scientist hat (looks great on you, by the way) and take a look at your Hootsuite Analytics dashboard or calculate your engagement rates using the methods above.
Now, see which posts or social media campaigns land at the top and the bottom of your analytics. Identify any patterns you notice. Maybe talking-head posts are nearing engagement extinction while high-quality content like your top five roundup posts has boomed and increased your Instagram engagement.
Track direct messages, comments, and mentions, too. These will give you insight into what your audience wants more or dislikes. Is everyone messaging you the same five questions about how to use a product? It might be time to make a post answering those questions.
7. Post at your best times
One of the best ways to capture peak engagement is to post when your audience is active. Whether your audience is on Instagram or LinkedIn, it’s important to know the best times to post on social media for every platform.
Keep in mind that while there are general guidelines for posting times, the best time for you and your content is whenever your audience is most active and engaged.
“Post consistently and at times when your audience is most active,” suggests Christy Stewart-Harfmann, a digital marketing professor. “Use platform insights to determine peak times and days.”
When you publish content through Hootsuite, the platform automatically suggests the best time to post based on your social media performance, audience and engagement metrics. This eliminates the guessing game and primes your content for the most engagement in real-time.
3. Create a specific engagement strategy
Develop an engagement social media strategy to support your engagement-specific goals. You don’t have to create an entirely new content strategy, but rather, work in a branch dedicated to engagement.
First, determine your engagement goals. These may be:
- Changing public perception of your brand awareness
- Developing new customer leads
- Collecting feedback about new products
- Educating your audience with resources and advice
Pro tip: Be sure you’re setting SMART social media goals.
Once you have identified where you want to go, brainstorm types of content to deliver on your goals. Then, work this content into your overall social media calendar.
4. Be authentic
Your audience follows you for a reason. Whether they find your content educational or entertaining or just vibe with your personality, so it’s important to remain authentic if you want to retain your audience.
“As corny as it sounds, truly being ourselves and letting our personalities and humor shine goes a long way in creating authentic content and building an engaging audience,” says food blogger Alewine.
“If a trend doesn’t feel like us, we don’t do it. We can’t fake it, and we know doing stuff that doesn’t excite us will result in boring content.
Conclusion
In conclusion, after trying out these 10 effective tips, I can confidently say that they really make a difference in how to increase social media engagement. By staying consistent, interacting with my audience, and focusing on creating engaging content, I’ve seen a noticeable improvement in my online presence. If you’re looking to boost your social media game, these strategies are definitely worth implementing. Trust me, with the right approach, increasing social media engagement is totally achievable!