When it comes to social media, it’s not just about showing up. Sure, showing up is an important piece of the puzzle (and you hear me talk about it often). But social media is simply just media without meaningful engagement. If you’re only showing up on your page with content and never actually engaging with your audience, you’re missing out on the opportunity to build relationships with current and potential customers and clients. In this blog post, l dive into the significance of social media engagement, its impact on your business, and what actionable strategies you can implement to grow your engagement game.
Understanding Social Media Engagement
Social media engagement goes beyond likes and shares. It includes a spectrum of actions one can take on social media, including comments, DMs, clicks, and mentions. It serves as a measure for how your content is resonating with your audience. More than just a vanity metric, engagement plays a huge role in the algorithms of social media platforms. This means the greater your engagement, the more eyes your stuff is put in front of.
Why It Matters
Social media platforms favor accounts with higher engagement rates. Accounts that have greater active and thoughtful interactions with their audience are being prioritized when it comes to giving visibility. But engagement is not just a metric – it’s a tool for building authentic relationships. Social media provides a direct line to your target audience, allowing you to learn, empathize, and enhance their overall experience with your business. Engagement helps you to really get to know your clients and customers, and helps them to feel seen and understood by your brand. Especially when working with audiences of people in marginalized communities, authentic engagement allows your audience to find a safe place where they feel heard, valued, and cared for.
Strategies to Boost Social Media Engagement
Be Social
Make sure you’re doing more than just posting and ghosting. Respond to comments, mentions, and DMs in a timely manner to show your audience you care about their engagement. This also shows you aren’t just a robot spitting out content, but are a real human who cares about their content resonating with their audience.
Have an Authentic Voice
Developing and utilizing an authentic brand voice humanizes your business and keeps things consistent. Embrace a consistent tone, language, value set, and purpose. Incorporate GIFs, emojis, and even some colorful language (if that’s true to who you are!) to add personality to your communication. Most importantly, ensure it’s all an accurate reflection of you and your business! Don’t waste your time trying to create a brand voice that isn’t authentic to you. Your audience will appreciate connecting with the real you.
Know Your Algorithms
Each platform has a unique algorithm that helps determine how many eyes see your content. Try and focus on some of the things that play into these algorithms. Features like timing of posts, post types, and hashtags all make a difference! Experiment with different posting times to find when your audience is most active. Additionally, use relevant hashtags to increase the likelihood of your content being discovered. Try and tailor your social media strategy based on features that the specific platform you are using rewards.
Post Interactive, Quality Content Regularly
Consistent posting keeps you relevant in the minds of your followers. While you want to aim to be posting regularly, be sure you are setting realistic goals for yourself. If you set an unrealistic goal for yourself to post 5 times a week, you end up posting sporadically. However, if you set a realistic goal of 1 post per week, and can do so consistently, your audience will know to expect you once every week and will see you show up regularly.
Make sure to keep your content high quality, with a focus on interactive content. Call to actions, polls, and quizzes all encourage active participation. This inncreases engagement from your audience and provides you with valuable insights. As always, by providing quality, valuable content to your followers that meets a need or solves a problem for them, you show your worth and give them a place to feel seen and understood.
Building a successful online presence takes more than sporadic posting and ghosting. It needs a well-rounded engagement strategy that focuses on building relationships, resonating with your audience, and maximizing your reach with an authentic brand and voice. By taking some of these strategies and putting them into practice, businesses can not only survive the social media world, but begin to thrive as they build a community of followers that want to be engaged in the brand and business.
Are you interested in engaging your audience more authentically? For more tips and tricks on how to build a genuine following of engaged followers, follow Creativity Gravity on Instagram. Need more help in growing your authentic social media presence? Set up a FREE discovery call today and see how Creative Gravity can support you!
