Social media is currently the most effective way to reach your customers without spending a ton of money. Let me explain why. Studies have been conducted to look at how impactful social media engagement truly is.

A study in 2016 was able to discover that social media has a positive impact on brand loyalty and customer engagement. This study further establishes that social media can be used as a tool to engage with your customers to foster an even deeper customer relationship thus ensuring brand loyalty.

When harnessed correctly, social media can be optimally used to reach out to the right customers, engage with them, and create a loyal brand following! Here are some of the most effective ways to increase your social media engagement.

Know Your Audience

Posting content that’s relevant to your audiences is the most important aspect of social media engagement. After all, knowing your business’s audience is among the first key steps to making a business successful.

For example, if your business is leather goods, you won’t be posting a quote from Julia Child about the joys of cooking. That’s a little too far off and it might not hit home for most of your followers due to the fact that Julia Child is a famous cook.

By knowing your audience, you will be able to provide tailor-fit content that will spark interest and keep them engaged. In this way, you can also make sure that the conversation will always remain flowing.

Ask Questions!

In literature, questions are meant to help readers create their own opinion and formulate their own thoughts on a certain topic. It is not different when you’re on social media. Ending your posts with questions does the exact same effect.

Asking questions, or having open-ended statements, or even fill-in-the-blanks statements encourage participation from your community.

Famous posts on Facebook include asking customers to put a “reaction” to their post. This leads them to appear trending in the Facebook feed of their connections.

If you have a heavy Twitter following, you can utilize the platform to create polls. Through these polls, you can create the engagement you need and also get a sense of who your audience is.

Always Respond To Comments And Mentions

Engagement is conversations and as such, you will need to always respond to comments and mentions.

These days, people take their negative thoughts and feelings on their social media platforms. It is also true for the positive experience that they had with you as their customer. Just one mention from any of these followers and it will immediately snowball into your branding.

Whether or not you have a brick-and-mortar store where you can personally interact with your customers or a completely online-based business, it is important to create that positive customer experience so that you can have more of the positive comments and mentions on Facebook, Twitter, or Tiktok!

Share Other People’s Content

As an old saying goes, sharing is caring. This is also true and relevant if you want to increase your social media engagement.

Sharing other people’s content helps you connect with your audience. It allows your audience to be noticed, to be heard, which, in these recent years is among the most appreciated acts on social media. Provided of course that you have asked for permission from the original poster.

News outlets often use this technique to increase engagement from their followers. And, if you are instantly shared by one of these media giants, you’re definitely sure that the number of your followers will increase, and maybe, you can start having a significant following of your own.

Create Visual Posts

There are countless posts and a number of papers that mention how 65% of the population are visual learners. This statistic is often used by visual and creative companies in order to drive their market for people who need posts that are graphically designed.

I’ve searched high and low for the source of this claim, but found that the statistic might be false. Still, the impact of creating visual posts is observable by marketing specialists.

This is why companies have found value in creating infographics. 

Infographics are a relatively young word that might have first appeared in the 1960s. It is a combination of two words: information and graphics. It is called such because it is a very graphically-heavy representation of information.

In just one look, ideas and information that you would like to get across can easily be represented by one through the use of an infographic.

Ask Followers To Talk About Themselves

Allowing another person to talk freely about themselves is what helps a relationship in real life to grow and mature. This is also applicable in the case of social media.

Asking your followers to share bits of information about themselves helps provide you with certain information that can both boost your customer engagement as well as help you get to know your customers just a little bit better.

Another way to look at it is that you’re giving your users the chance to be heard, to go viral, to trend. These days, going viral and trending is among the minds of the young generation.

If you recall, one of the most viral trends that allowed social media users to talk about themselves is the photo collage from Dolly Parton. 

The trend, which eventually became known as the #dollypartonchallenge, collages photos of the social media use of the possible profile photo that they would use if they were on the four biggest social media platforms namely Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, and of course, Tinder.

The #dollypartonchallenge was effective that everyone seemed to have joined the viral challenge. In a way, joining the challenge allowed people who participated to not only talk or express themselves, it let them poke fun at themselves, and show off their most gorgeous photos, too.

Conclusion

Social media engagement is important and if you would like to have a loyal customer following, your strategies must be effective and of course, respectful of everyone who will be seeing your post.

When done excellently, social media engagement can also make your business propel towards success.

To help you create effective and engaging social media posts or for any digital marketing needs, please follow The Marketing Skillet.