Are You Engaging? 3 Easy Ways to Boost Social Media Engagement

It’s Friday afternoon. You get a 10 minute lull at work, just enough to take a few personal minutes and check social media. You scroll through your massive News Feed quickly, hunting for something worthwhile. Every ten or so posts, something catches your attention and you click to find out more. What is, for you, a typical afternoon activity, is fascinating to marketers. How long do your eyes spend on each particular post before they move down the page? What are the criteria for the split-second decision to either click or move on? These questions gave birth to the concept of “engagement metrics”—measurements of just how effective your posts are at achieving their intended purpose. The great thing about engagement metrics is that they also tell you something about the quality of content you’re producing. You might be posting on social media 5 times a day, and be getting the same amount of total Likes as a company that posts once a week. In that case, you could almost certainly learn something from that company—they’re getting the same results as you, with 97% less effort. All of our general opinions about content creation apply to social media posts: telling a good story and offering value will do wonders for your engagement metrics. However, there are some much more simple tricks for boosting social media engagement that you can try in conjunction with the above. Here are 3 relatively easy ways to boost the engagements of your posts:

1. Use images. We can’t stress this enough. Simply having an image, irrespective of what your post is actually about, can increase interaction rate on Facebook by 85% and increase retweets by 35%. With numbers like those, having an image for every social media post is a no-brainer.

2. Give your take on curated content. You likely don’t create every piece of content you share on social media. Some of the time, you’re probably sharing news, industry trends, or interesting posts by others. This curated content lead the user to engage with the original post, but not necessarily with you. To change that, add a sentence or two of your own commentary when sharing a post. Something as simple as “Great post, we agree completely” or “Interesting, but they didn’t account for ______” will make you an active participant in the conversation.

3. Crowdsource questions. Social media gets your message in front of thousands of users, all of which are willing to engage with you in a small way. That makes it the perfect platform for asking engaging questions or taking polls to get a sense of how your audience feels about a particular topic. Just make sure that it’s something worthy of your users’ time—an industry-specific question tends to bring in much more engagement than something like “What’s everyone up to this weekend?”

The great thing about these strategies is that they work synergistically: you can re-share a post containing industry news (including an image), give your take the topic, and ask your audience how they feel about it. Whether you use them together or individually, these three easy strategies will definitely result in a rise of your social media engagement metrics. Start implementing them today!   [templatera id=”10393″]