How To Grow Your Social Media Engagement

How To Grow Your Social Media Engagement

Are you struggling to gain any traction on social media? Confused as to why followers aren’t engaging with your posts?

Here’s how to grow your social media engagement.

Social media marketing can be a great tool to not only drive traffic but to also build relationships and encourage word-of-mouth referrals. To build your social media into a hub of activity, you will need to work on increasing engagement.

In this blog post, I’m going to run through how often you should be posting on different social networks, what type of content you should be posting for engagement, when you should be posting and how to encourage engagement.

How Often Should You Post?

Most businesses assume that the more you post, the better.

While this may be true in some circumstances, it isn’t necessarily best practice for all.

How often you post really depends on what industry you’re in and your audience behaviours.

Another thing that many don’t take into account is the speed of different social networks.

Just because you’re posting 10 times a day on Twitter, certainly does not mean you should be posting 10 times a day on Facebook.

Each social network will need its own frequency strategy.

Facebook

Let’s have a look at how often you should be posting on Facebook first.

Organic Facebook marketing has become very hard over the years what with algorithm changes and increased competitor activity.

In fact, a recent study by Adweek showed that businesses increased the number of Facebook posts from 31% in 2015 compared to 2014.

The below graph from HubSpot shows that companies who have 1 to 200 followers will see better engagement posting 1 to 5 times a month while companies who have 10,001 followers and more will see more engagement when posting 31 to 60 times a month.

Twitter

Next up is Twitter. It is well known for marketers to post more times a day on Twitter than other social networks because of how fast the timeline moves.

However does it really help to post every hour of the day? An experiment done by Socialbakers found that engagement will decrease after posting 3 times in one day.

You don’t want to post so much as to annoy your followers which you will know if you receive a high number of unfollows a month.

LinkedIn

Last up is LinkedIn, which most B2B companies haven’t yet worked how to get the best results from.

We recently did a blog post on Generating Qualified Leads Using LinkedIn, which you can have a read of too.

Just like with Facebook, you will see more engagement posting fewer times a month if you’re a small business than posting every day if you’re a global business.

LinkedIn suggests 20 times per month will get your business in front of 60% of your connections however it does not detail best practices for small businesses, large businesses and everything in between.

Knowing What Content Your Audience Want

Now that you have an idea of how often you should be posting on each of the most popular social networks let’s look at what type of content helps generate engagement.

As much as you’re probably tired of hearing it, valuable content is what will increase engagement on your social media accounts.

This doesn’t exactly mean that you have to create a 30,000 word eBook every week; valuable content could be in the form of industry news, sharing content with others or even jumping on trending events.

Here are some of the many forms of content that will help increase engagement.

You can experiment with these to find what works best for your audience.

Inspirational Quotes

One type of post that always seems to do well is the inspiration quote type posts.

These work even better when you think of your own inspirational quotes and brand them.

Your followers will come to expect them and look forward to them. For example, look at these two posts for Hewlett-Packard and Missguided.

While both of this example are very different, they work so well because they do them regularly, their quotes are unique, they brand them and because they relate to their target audience.

You may have tried using inspirational quotes before, but if they were too generic and had been seen before, they won’t get much engagement.

Industry News

If you can keep up to date with everything that is going on in the industry and round it up for your audience, you will certainly be saving them a huge job.

A good example of this is from Social Media Examiner. They consistently share top industry news for the week and round it up to save so their followers will never miss out.

 

This Week in Social Media: Snapchat makes adding people easier with profile URLs, Facebook broadens Audience Network…

Posted by Social Media Examiner on Saturday, 30 January 2016

Your Own Content

If you’re already sharing your own content but aren’t getting any engagement, it may be an indication that your content marketing may need to be reviewed.

It could also be because of how you are sharing your content.

For example, if you’re giving people the solution in the post then there is no point in them clicking through.

The best way to share your own content is to highlight a benefit so followers want to click through to find out how they can do the same.

Content From Others

Not all of us have time to post new content every day or post content on trending topics that you want to share in the next hour to join the trend.

The alternative solution is to post content from others.

Followers will feel that you are helping them by sharing valuable content (even if it isn’t yours) instead of continuing to push your brand in front of them.

Visuals

Visuals let followers digest information more quickly than if they were to read.

This is why more businesses are posting images and videos than text posts.

In fact, Buffer found that posts that contain visuals get 150% more retweets than those that do not.

If you’re sharing a link or want others to share your links then make sure the default image acts as a kind of cover photo for the blog post.

Trending Events

Another great way to join in conversations that your audience is talking about is to think of creative ways to relate your product to the trending event.

You probably all remember this bit of genius from Oreo Cookies who managed to get over 10,000 retweets in under an hour just by posting this very simple post.

This worked so well because it they took huge advantage of a trend that almost the whole world was tweeting about.

Knowing When To Post

As well as knowing how often to post, it is important to get right what time of day and day of the week to post.

There are plenty of different opinions on this so it really is hard to pinpoint when are the best times to post.

Going back to the Adweek study I spoke about earlier, they found that B2B businesses seen a 14% increase in engagement when posting on weekdays while Danzarrella found that B2C companies seen a 17% increase in engagement when posting on Wednesday’s and at weekends.

Be The First To Engage

I find the best way to generate engagement is to be the first to engage.

You can do this by joining in conversations on social media but also by changing how you write your own posts.

I have listed 3 ways in which you can use your posts to encourage conversations.

Ask Questions

One of the easier ways you can encourage followers to engage is to simply ask them a question.

It is surprising how many businesses and marketers don’t use social media to ask their followers questions.

A study done by HubSpot found that posts that ask a question receive a higher number of comments that posts that do not have a question.

Some types of questions may generate more comments than others but you can experiment with this and build your own study that is tailored to you and your followers.

Host Contests

If you’re looking for a boost in engagement rather than a steady build to jumpstart your social media then hosting a contest is the best way to go.

To avoid generating a bunch of ‘compers’ though, make sure the contest is something that only your audience would be interested in or that the prize is something that only your audience would be interested in.

Host Q&A Sessions

Another sure fire way to get your followers to talk to you is to host Q&A sessions which work brilliantly on Twitter but can also work on Facebook too. You could maybe even set up your own Facebook group to build a community of people where everyone helps each other and you share your valuable tips… almost like a membership site.

Conclusion

Hopefully now you have a good idea of how you can kick-start your social media and start building your engagement.

Use social media for the reason it was made, to socialise with your followers and fans.

Do you struggle to get your followers and fans to engage with your posts?

Leave your experiences, questions and ideas in the comments below.

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