Midway through 2022 now, businesses over the world have realized the power of social media in establishing customer relationships. A recent study showed that marketers spent almost $99 Billion on social media marketing in 2020.

Importance of Social Media Engagement

Over the past few months, the use of social media channels by customers has grown exponentially, especially since the lockdown. Today there are approximately 3.8 Billion social media users all over the world, out of which almost 54% of them browse their favourite channels to research products and services before they make a purchase decision.

That is a 54% window for brands to influence and make an impact on the minds of their customers. Moreover, adults are most likely to follow a brand on social media, and a whopping 95% already do. Clearly, it is on social media that you will find your customers, and it is where they want you to be as well. This is mostly because social media is a place where brands get a chance to directly get in touch with a brand, get close with a brand, and interact with a brand, with quick and easy responses.

This is precisely why engagement is the most important thing in social media. It is in fact the sole factor that contributes to the growth and success of a brand on multiple networks. Proper social engagement and prompt responses result in good customer experiences, which in turn boost growth through word of mouth and recommendations.

Statistics suggest that customers are 71% more likely to recommend a brand on social media to a friend or family member after having a positive customer experience with the brand. That settles it. social engagement is the name of the game. Undoubtedly, brands must, by all means, keep customers engaged as well as entertained, with relevant information, offers, deals and whatnot. The competition is already fierce. Brands are already fighting to grab customer attention on social media, leading to an information explosion pretty much every second.

However, it is important to remember that it is not about bombarding the most number of offers and information on customers. It is about using the right offers at the right times. In other words, you need to use the right strategy to gain traction and improve social engagement with customers. The wrong strategy can only keep you working hard every day without any visible results. Here’s what a winning social engagement strategy encompasses.

3 Aspects of a Successful Social Media Engagement Strategy

A winning social engaging strategy takes into consideration 3 aspects.

1. Consistency

Consistency is extremely important in the world of social media. This is because each of the social media platforms has its own complicated algorithms that may well work against you and keep you from growing if you don’t post content regularly. Being consistent with content also keeps customers from unfollowing you or unsubscribing from your channel, and keeps them expecting more relevant content from you.

In order to stay regular and consistent, most companies use social media management tools that offer top-notch automation features like content scheduler, with which they can automatically schedule posts and plan their editorial calendar beforehand. They also come with other features that help with social media listening, creating content and responding effectively to customers. In addition, they offer analytics as well, with which you can measure your performance and take action if necessary.

Hipsocial is the perfect example of an efficient social media management solution that offers a host of features, not only to stay consistent on social media but also to increase social engagement. With its media scheduling features, you can plan out your content for social media, schedule posts based on different time zones and effectively share content for review by your team. It also comes with social media listening features to gauge industry and competitor trends and analytics to track your performance across all your social media channels in one place.

2. Relevance

The next most important thing to remember when devising a social engagement strategy is to post relevant content. Now as a brand, you’ve established a good follower base that is interested in what you have to offer. But it is important to constantly monitor customer behaviour, track their activities, engage in their conversations and find out what they need, what their problems are and what is their general sentiment at different times so that you can create and post content that is relevant to them. You can use tools which provide social listening features to do the same.

Quality and variety of content are also equally important to boost engagement, but relevance is what customers resonate with most, which is why it will get them to engage more.

3. Power of Psychology in Social Engaging

At the end of the day, it is human beings that you are trying to reach out to. And we all know humans are emotional beings. The one tried and tested guaranteed technique to get customers’ attention and get them involved in conversations is to leverage the power of psychology.

This does require you to do some heavy research and study customer behaviour more intently though. Make sure to do so and incorporate emotional and positive psychological elements in your content to turn things in your favour.

“Get to know your customers. Humanize them. Humanize yourself. It’s worth it.” – Kristin Smaby

Keeping these three aspects in mind can help you create a successful engagement strategy. TSM Blogging further talks about their 17 tactics for more social media engagement.

What is your most successful tactic for more social media engagement? https://t.co/oBa7r03wbl

— tsmblogging (@tsmblogging) December 9, 2020

With that said, here are 7 important things about social engagement that will further help you boost engagement rates.

7 Tips About Social Media Engagement

Now that you know how crucial is social media engagement, let's go through some tips to execute the same:

1. Focus on Participating and Engaging

Most companies make the big mistake of posting content at peak activity times and then leaving the platform to check back later. However, this immensely affects your social engagement levels in a negative way.

As a brand that your customers follow, it is very important to be available at all times to respond back to comments and DMs, even after posting content. It is also important to talk to your customers, ask them questions through the different feedback features of social media and always keep them in the loop when thinking of new products or campaigns, rather than just making announcements. You can use a social media management app to engage on multiple platforms from one place

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2. Leverage Emotions the Right Way

As mentioned before, psychological techniques are bound to work. Hence, leveraging emotions is a powerful way to boost social engagement.

Happiness has been found to be the most powerful of all emotions. Statistically, positive social media posts prompt an average of 1.75 more positive responses from friends. Therefore, you need to craft post titles or captions in strategic ways to induce this emotion.

Other emotions like fear, sadness and anger can also be leveraged to boost social engagement, but they should be used very carefully, lest they backfire.

3. Use Visual Graphics

Visual content including pictures, videos and digital media such as infographics is known to make a profound impact on viewers. They help attract more eyeballs and social engagement than text-based content. By all means, you must include more properly researched and created digital media, videos, cinemagraphs and pictures in your content plan. You can use tools with media integration to create visually appealing posts.

4. Pay Attention to Peak Activity Times

Always remember to post content at high activity times for the most amount of social engagement. Social media platforms offer their own insightful analytics in this regard using which companies can figure out optimal posting times. Apart from that social management platforms can also be used to obtain more detailed insights regarding peak activity times.

For example, Hipsocial features an array of analytics that will help you study a lot of aspects of your customers’ activity levels, including what times they are more active, what type of customers are active, where they are located and what device they are using. All of these features combined can help you figure out the best times to post content.

5. Use Social Media Features to Boost Reach

Social media channels roll out exclusive and advanced engagement features such as FB Live and Instagram Reels every once in a while, all of which are meant to boost social engagements. After launch, the respective social media algorithms work to boost the reach of the creators that make use of their new features naturally. Hence, it is very important that you join the bandwagon as well and create engaging content to naturally boost your social engagements.

6. Show Your Face

Don’t forget to show your human side every once in a while through different means on social media. Displaying a human face helps increase credibility and allows customers to resonate more with you. Once again, this draws off of the psychological effect of induced trust in seeing human faces rather than random content and company-related information.

Make an effort to show some behind-the-scenes and bits of personal life as well, along with other relevant content, so that customers can resonate with you and engage more with you. Appear more on live features and stories with interesting real-life content.

7. Use Analytics to Make Improvements

Finally, it is very important to constantly monitor your post performances and social engagement results with the help of social media analytics and make improvements effectively to stay relevant.

Social media management tools like Hipsocial can give you detailed insights into how your posts performed including the number of likes, comments and shares received, the amount of impressions received from each of your hashtags, the number of profile visits and many more. Make use of such insights to optimize your content and overall Social engagement strategy.

Bottom Line

As is evident from the above 7-pointers, it is important to develop and use the right strategies to reach out to customers and boost social engagement. And the right strategy can be devised by carefully analysing customer demographics and understanding your customers thoroughly. Follow up by posting relevant content consistently and you are sure to grow by leaps and bounds.