Small businesses, big businesses and every business in between can benefit from a proper Social Media Marketing strategy. Whether you’re using Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest or any other social platform to market your business, engagement is a key factor in reaching more people and potential customers or clients.
While increasing your engagement alone won’t ensure more sales for your business, it is part of a strategy to bring more people to your digital space, which absolutely can, then, get more people clicking on your links, browsing your website, recognizing your business, signing up for promotions, attending events and even purchasing your products and services.
What is Social Media Engagement?
When we say social media engagement, we’re referring to the actions people take that shows them interacting with your business. Things like: following your account, liking a post, making a comment, sharing your content, direct messaging your page or saving a reel. These actions turn on-lookers into measurable, active participants in your brand. These actions signal to the algorithms that people desire to interact with your company. In a perfect world, the platforms would show your content to more of your community- followers and non-followers alike.
How to Encourage Social Media Engagement
The challenge for business owners, social media managers, marketing teams, etc is to get more people to engage with their content in a natural and organic way. Ads are great, but there’s nothing that beats getting genuine interactions. Here are some ideas to get your followers talking:
- Be a conversation starter instead of an announcer. People love to share their opinions!
- Ask general questions theming them to holidays, your industry, your community and more
- Poll your audience for This or That
- Ask customers to “caption a photo”
- Inquire about your client’s favorite {flavor, color, option, etc}
- Find out their pain points and challenges (which you can turn into blog posts later)
- Show real people and behind-the-scenes content. Humans like to interact with human things: people they know and can relate to.
- Share employee spotlights
- Post team celebrations
- Follow a project with time-lapse videos
- Connect with a “day-in-the-life” (so good for Stories)
- Humor your customers with funny moments around the office
- Create valuable, shareable content. People are very likely to share and react to your content if it solves a problem for them or helps them start conversations of their own.
- Quick how- to videos keep people coming back and saving to their accounts
- Answer FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions)
- Offer Seasonal tips that pertain to your business or industry
- Post checklists that include your products or services
- Share customer success stories (with permission) that they will often share again themselves.
As you plan your social media engagement strategy, be sure to consider how the posts could affect, help, support, encourage or entice your current and potential clients. Here are some other ways you can keep the conversation going:
- Respond to every comment and message as promptly as possible.
- Ask only one question per post to keep it easy to answer.
- Use photos and videos of your actual business whenever possible.
- Encourage customers to tag your business or share their experiences.
Lastly, be sure to post consistently. The best tool for keeping yourself on track is a Social Media Content Calendar. It helps you and your team to stay focused, prepare for your posts in a timely manner and keeps you from hitting creative blocks when you’re trying to come up with posts on the fly.
To help you stay consistent, we’ve created a Free Social Media Content Calendar for the months of July, August and September for you to use for your own business. It’s filled with prompts you can take as-is or use it to curate your own ideas from the suggestions we’ve compiled. Just fill out the form below. Our team of social media professionals is happy to create a custom content calendar for your business as well! Just reach out.
Calendar Form
Free Content Calendar
