First things first, what is social media engagement?

Social media engagement is the measurement of comments, likes, and shares across your social media platforms. One of the greatest ways to achieve social media success is through an engaged audience not just the number of followers you have. With everything on social media, it is all about quality over quantity.

Social media engagement includes:

• Likes
• Comments
• Retweets and Favourites
• Shares and Saves
• Mentions
• Clicks

Engagement is great for you to figure out whether the content you are creating is resonating with your audience.

Why Is Social Media Engagement So Important?

Over the last few years, organic reach on social media has dropped. However, it is important to note, that accounts with higher social media engagement are the least affected. Fun Fact: Facebook prioritises accounts that have meaningful engagements. Having great social media engagement means that your customers are building a stronger relationship with your brand.

Measuring your social media engagement is incredibly important because it allows you to see whether your followers are enjoying the content you are creating or whether you need to change things up. Once you have gathered this information you can then optimise your content in the future.

How To Increase Social Media Engagement?

You can increase your social media engagement in several ways. Some of these ways are:

Analyse Your Engagement Across Social Platforms

Before you can increase and improve your social media platform, you need to know what your engagement rate is. Your engagement rate helps you to figure out how much your audience is engaging with your posts. Your engagement rate should be sitting between 1% and 5%. For example, our engagement rate here at Lumos is 6.41% which is excellent. Our favourite way to measure engagement is to use the Instagram engagement calculator on Phlanx. This tool works only for Instagram, but other social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have built-in tools where you can track your analytics. Once you know your engagement rate, you can work towards improving it.

Produce A Social Media Engagement Strategy

If your engagement is not as great as you want it to be, then you need to come up with a new strategy and if you have not already got a strategy…CREATE ONE. When creating your strategy, it is important to produce specific goals and metrics that you want to achieve. All the best goals are measurable, produce specific numbers. Your goals can be anything that you want to achieve, no matter how big or small. Some of your goals may be reaching/ gaining new followers in a month, getting a certain number of shares/ retweets etc. Whatever you want your goals to be, write them down. Just ensure that you are putting measurable steps in place to achieve your goals. You cannot just write down how many followers you want to gain by the end of the month, how are you going to achieve this?

Post Regularly

Being consistent across all social media platforms is one of the keys to great engagement. Posting once every two weeks will not help you to achieve results. Idea: Put together a list of all the social media platforms that your target audience is active on and create a content calendar. Posting frequently is what will keep your audience interested in your platform and can help you to attract new followers. If you find it overwhelming trying to post across all your social media platforms, then sign up and use a scheduling tool. Our favourite scheduling tool to use here at Lumos is Buffer. Using a scheduling tool will help you to further remain active and consistent.

Host Contests and Giveaways

Hosting contests and giveaways are great for encouraging people to follow your page, along with commenting, sharing, and tagging their friends. Hosting competitions is one of the most popular tactics to increase social media engagement and it interests people in seeing what your brand has to offer. However, it is important to keep in mind, when you are running a contest that your prizes relate to your business/ brand so that your followers can become customers.

Have Fast Response Times

This is important when it comes to increasing your engagement. When your followers’ comment, ask questions, send you DMs you should respond as soon as you see the comments. This will make your followers feel like a priority and give increased customer satisfaction.

Collab With Influencers

Influencer marketing is an increasingly popular tactic to raise brand awareness and they can reach an enormous number of people. Do your research and contact influencers who align with your company and company values. It is important to remember you do not need to collab with influencers who have millions of followers, there are different ranges of influencers which you can contact.

That is everything you need to know about social media engagement. To read more about social media marketing, digital marketing, SEO etc then click here to read.