You’ve built a robust social media presence and a strong follower base: congratulations! But the job’s not done yet. You need to continue to engage your social media audience if you want to keep them and ensure your reach moves in the right direction.
Here are the tips you need to ensure your existing audience keeps coming back for more of your content while engaging new potential followers, too.
Navigation of Contents
Be Social
While it may be tempting to just hop onto your social media platforms to upload your latest content or share some news with your followers, your best bet to keep your audience engaged on social media is to actually – you know – be social.
Taking the time to respond to comments, get into conversation, and interact with your followers is the quickest way to build a loyal, engaged community. Social media tools make it super easy to track comments, mentions, and conversations, so there’s no risk of missing an opportunity to connect with your existing audience or potential new followers.
Mix Up Your Content
Offering your audience a mixed bag of content is a great way to keep things interesting and boost engagement. If, to date, you’ve concentrated on images and newsletters, how about adding some video how-to guides to your social media repertoire?
Similarly, try adding interesting visual elements to your content, such as a free stock video, sound effects, or a great backing track to keep things fresh.
Get Interactive
One of the quickest ways to get your audience engaged with your social media presence is to include plenty of interactive content. Hold regular polls, competitions, and giveaways, and throw the floor open to your followers by asking questions and soliciting opinions.
User-generated content (USG) is always a winner, too: think of ways to encourage your audience to create and submit relevant content that you can post on your platform. As well as boosting reach, USG is an effective way to gain new followers, too.
Use a Consistent Voice
Part of developing your brand on social media and keeping followers coming back for fresh new content is developing a consistent tone or voice that you use across all channels. This will help your audience feel like they have a connection with you and boost your visibility factor, too.
This is linked to authentic communication, which is a vital way for your brand to stand out in a crowded market and differentiate itself from competitors. Your followers want to feel as though you’re talking to them as people rather than as potential sales stats. Choose a voice that reflects your brand as a whole, and stick with it in all your posts.
Always Add Value
Posting regularly isn’t enough. To really get into the minds and hearts of your followers, you need to post consistently high-quality, high-value content. This means content that serves a purpose for the viewer, whether this is providing them with the information they need in an interesting way, solving a problem for them, or simply making them laugh.
What can really help with this is figuring out what your audience actually wants to hear about. Consider using tools to, for example, track conversation topics and stay on top of what your competitors are doing (successfully) to get a handle on the things that are of most relevance or interest to your audience.
Understand the Importance of Timings to Boost Engagement
When you post your content on social media can have a critical impact on the nature and level of engagement it generates. To keep your audience engaged, you need to post when it’s most likely to be seen. Use your analytical tools to find out when your followers are most likely to be active and schedule your social media posts during this time.
It’s also important to understand how different platforms weigh engagement in terms of their algorithms so you can use this to your advantage. For example, LinkedIn gives the most weight to posts that achieve engagement within the first sixty minutes of going live, whereas Instagram’s algorithm doesn’t take into account the timing of engagements.
Regularly Measure and Assess Engagement
To keep things moving in the right direction on the audience engagement front – and see where potential tweaks to your strategy are needed – you need to create a system to measure this. To increase your social media engagement, you have to monitor it.
As part of this, it’s a good idea to interrogate brand perception and overall reach in terms of the total number of likes, shares, comments, and clicks over a certain time period – say, once a month.
Final Thoughts: Boosting Social Media Engagement to Build a Loyal Audience Base
Use the guide above to keep your existing audience engaged and reach out to new followers. Taking a multi-pronged approach by keeping your content fresh and high quality, engaging your audience by responding to as many comments as posts as possible, and using a consistent voice is an effective way to keep things moving in the right direction.
By regularly assessing your efforts when it comes to engagement, you’ll be able to take steps to tweak your strategy as necessary – and keep doing more of the things that are working like a dream.