Social media has evolved over the years, becoming not only a location to connect with friends and family, but also the perfect area to market your business. From text and chat to pictures and videos, social platforms have a range of interactive opportunities for businesses from different industries to establish their online presence.
Let’s delve deeper to understand more about social media and user engagement.
What is social media engagement?
Over 3 billion people use social media globally, which accounts for more than half of the world’s population, and your audience is part of this number. But are they connecting with your ads content? For marketers around the world, user engagement is a key metric to measure their company’s effectiveness and impact in the market. If you have no user interaction, then this implies that you have a weak social media marketing strategy. This is more than vanity metrics, it refers to fostering healthy customer relationships that fuels your brand’s credibility and profitability. Here are a few social media marketing tips you’ll need to increase your user engagement.
1. Identify your audience
Every business has a defined audience based on their product verticals. One of the biggest mistakes you could make would be not knowing what types of people make up your audience as this is the crux of social media engagement. The better you know your audience, the more your marketing strategy improves and most importantly, converts.. You should understand their demographics including their age group, occupation, interests, geographic location, psychological variables and more. Furthermore, you should segment your audience into specific buyer personas to help you target them more effectively.
Buyer personas are a comprehensive description of fictional characters that represent your potential customers. You must clearly define their demographics, goals, behavioural traits, buying patterns and pain areas. Creating personas like these assists you in drafting practical tailored marketing materials to reach your target audience better. Studies reveal that using a buyer persona improved websites’ effectiveness by 2 to 5 times. Furthermore, we also see that ads which are behaviorally targeted are two times more effective than non-targeted ads, and boosted email marketing campaigns click through rate and open rate by five and two times respectively.
To create strong buyer personas, you need to do a lot of audience research. You can accomplish this by studying your current customers, interviewing your prospects, and also talking with your team members – especially sales reps. Doing this will help you identify any loopholes and come up with a strategy that makes your buyer persona foolproof. Use buyer personas to sketch effective social media marketing strategies targeted to drive your business growth.
2. Create resourceful content and post frequently
To amplify your user engagement, you must create valuable content and post it consistently. Creating content is much easier when you have your buyer personas handy. You must also remember that different social media platforms have different benchmarks for fostering audience engagement. Studies show that Facebook & Instagram require 1-2 posts on a daily basis, Twitter at least 5 tweets per day, and Pinterest a minimum of five pins everyday. Doing this will help your feed stay relevant, fresh, and also helps you get the attention of your audience. Apart from post frequency, the time you schedule to post your content also matters. The ideal time would be to schedule posts for the best times your target audience would be active based on their location.
Another essential element of content creation is the type of content you post. Other than generic images and videos, try asking them questions to know what they like – rolling out polls is one of the easiest ways to make them get engaged in your content.
What your audience will connect with depends on what they’re interested in. See what your competitors are doing and follow their lead – but don’t forget to put your own spin on it!
3. Exploit the features
With fierce competition between social media platforms, there are constant updates to these platforms introducing new features and testing the waters to see what works best in order to maintain and increase their share of users on their platforms. Because these platforms tend to witness frequent updates, even if your content strategy has been working well for you, any change, tweak, or update in the algorithm can alter the results of your engagement. This is the reason why you always need to watch out for these platform updates, stay sharp, and be proactive to always stay ahead of your competition.
4. Don’t hesitate to use humor
Sometimes, a touch of humor can work wonders and amplifies your engagement rate compared to other approaches. Comedy has been used as an instrumental marketing tool from the initial days of advertising. Today, when we look at different platforms, humor is spread everywhere from captioned memes to videos on platforms like TikTok by brands across the world.
Over 71% of social media users are on these platforms to watch comedy content. And these platforms have various opportunities to present humorous content in many different creative styles. Comedy improves relatability, fosters emotional connection, boosts brand recall, and increases your shared content count quite better than any other content type. Though its impact will draw an audience, getting it right requires effort and can be tricky as well. Use it infrequently, and do not rely on it. When used strategically, humor elements will spur your engagement rate rapidly.
5. Reveal your human side
You shouldn’t sound monotonous as a business while on social media, the key of your existence on these platforms is to add a human touch. Don’t just stop at liking or sharing posts from customers, see if you can strike up a conversation with them. You can accomplish this by replying to their queries either in kindness or sometimes even in humor. Go beyond posting your products and services and show them your team to keep it more relatable and human. After all, it is exciting to interact with businesses when we get to know that there are real faces behind all the operations.
6. Don’t be afraid of DMs
The internet has transformed the ways in which businesses can communicate with their customers and potential market. Despite its powerful reach, we see that brands haven’t yet taken hold of the power of direct messaging (DMs) to amplify their marketing efforts. In this instant generation, DMs are a boon and most social media platforms offer this feature. This is as important as the posts, shares, likes, and comments you receive on your brand’s page. You can use DMs for networking with your followers, promoting your offers, resolving any unpleasant customer service issues privately, and building customer loyalty.
7. Games and giveaways
For generations, companies from different industries have come up with creative ways of engaging with their audience. With mini-games, interactive videos, and playable ads, brands have been trying their best to stay on top of the social media gamut. A lot of businesses engage in giveaways to increase interactions between them and their customers. One of the best strategies for executing a giveaway is going in for comment based giveaways. All you need to do is customize your message, ensure that it is attractive to your audience, make it fun, easy, & quite straightforward. Let’s take a look at one such example which resorted to gamification to remain abreast in this fast paced digital space.
Burberry, one of the world’s renowned fashion brands released its very own game called “B Bounce” late in 2019 to boost its online customer engagement. The game’s concept featured a deer shaped character which was dressed in one of Thomas Burberry’s monogram puffer jackets. Players had to make the deer reach the moon by making it bounce between platforms and went in the chance to win a puffer jacket from Burberry’s collection as a first prize and the remaining individuals received custom-made gifts and virtual Burberry puffer jackets on the digital picture of their choice.
8. Sharing user-generated content
This strategy has been used by many brands and the results are commendable. Sharing user generated content featuring your brand hashtags are one of ways of free-advertising and also fostering brand loyalty in your audience. Brands in the fashion industry have mastered and exploited this strategy more than any other. While creating a desire to get customers experience your brand for the first time is one side of the game, cultivating life-long relationships with them as a brand is on another level.
To implement this strategy, you need to ask your customers to share their experience of your brand and how it benefited them, and get them to use your hashtags and mention you in their posts. Upon receiving these notifications, you can repost their content which brings them to the limelight. The end result is you get happy and loyal customers. This method is similar to a testimonial. One of the by-products of executing this strategy is increased brand visibility in social media platforms.
9. Influencer marketing
Talking about social media engagement is incomplete without mentioning influencer marketing. Paid partnership collaborations with influencers who have your target audience in their follower base will help you expand your reach easily. But the challenge lies in vetting the right influencers whose values align with your brand’s values and conducting a background check on their follower base.
Research reveals that for every dollar spent in influencer marketing, brands generate a revenue of $5.20 which shows how lucrative this marketing channel is. Furthermore, it reveals that around 61% of marketers claim finding the right influencers for collaborations can be quite difficult. Working with the experienced team at Game Marketing Genie can help you manage your influencer marketing campaigns from end-to-end so you can focus on your business.
10. Go live and create videos
Social media features help you create interactive content. Considering Instagram alone with the platform’s Lives, IGTV, stories, and reels, you are able to present content in brilliant ways to capture your audience’s attention. From making announcements of new projects, products, updates, releases to even showing your audience the behind the scenes elements and helping them to get a sneak peek into what you do, videos are a great way to enhance audience engagement.
And in recent years, video content has been taking over the traditional image and content posts. Studies show that video content generates over 1200% of shares compared to images and texts. Additionally, videos that last 2 minutes receive the most engagement. With this massive impact that videos generate, it is hard to ignore it – so you need to implement it into your social media marketing strategy as soon as possible!
Your ultimate guide to social media
Social media is essential for growth marketing success, but it needs to be done right. If you want the leading insider tips to help you succeed, check out our tips here: Social Media Marketing: Your Ultimate Guide to Growth.
Now that you understand the different ways to increase engagement on social media platforms, you can implement it to increase your engagement. But creating an effective social media strategy can be complicated.
The team at Growth Marketing Genie can help you elevate your social media presence using exclusive data-driven strategies customized to your business needs and use them to drive user engagement well into the future.
Get in touch with us to find out more!
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