If you’re a business owner in 2021, you’ll find it almost impossible to ignore social media marketing, and for good reason.
With 1.3 million new social media accounts being opened every day on average, many people live their lives through various social platforms. These include, but aren’t limited to, Facebook, Instagram, Tik-Tok, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Due to social media playing such a large role in our lives, marketers and business owners understand the massive amount of opportunity within social media marketing. And, if done properly, a solid social presence can revolutionize your business.
What Is Engagement In Social Media Marketing?
Social media engagement is what every marketer strives for with their social media campaigns. It’s what communicates a successful post and overall strategy.
Engagement consists of many different sub-metrics, which can be infinitely valuable when crafting and re-evaluating a current strategy. These sub-metrics include:
– The number of shares
– The play rate
– The number of likes
– The number of comments
– The number of saves
The engagement rate shows you how many people have interacted, in some way, with your post.
Why Is Engagement So Important For Social Media?
Your engagement rate shows you how many people have paid attention to your posts. This will tell you if your social content resonates and creates the impact you set out to create in your social media strategy.
Engagement is the first step toward profiting from your content and marketing efforts, so it’s arguably the most important and telling metric when using social platforms to market your business.
How to Keep Your Audience Engaged On Social Media
Now that we understand how engagement works and why it’s so important, let’s look at how to keep your audience engaged on social media.
Remember, engagement is absolutely pivotal. If you can cultivate a loyal following with a high engagement rate, you’ll see your efforts paying off quickly and effectively.
1. Analyze Your Current Engagement Rate
Before improving your engagement rate, you need first to know where your social media platform sits on the engagement scale.
For example, on Instagram, generally speaking, anything between 1% and 3% is classified as a ‘good’ engagement rate.
Learn where your engagement rate is currently so you can monitor it as a KPI to assess whether your strategy is working.
2. Determine Your Strategy
After considering your current engagement rate, you need to outline your new strategy. This should all revolve around your ideal buyer or client, considering carefully what form of content will capture their attention and encourage engagement most.
Lean on your foundations. Specifically, consider your ‘why’ and ensure your content communicates this.
3. Conduct Audience Research
This step will inform the second, too.
Conducting audience and market research will indicate what type of content resonates most with them.
Reflect on your audience avatar, and find a handful of social media channels that encompass similar qualities to that of your avatar. Trace their activity, paying particular attention to how they engage with business and brand pages.
Try to spot patterns between each of the accounts, looking too at what they are posting.
4. Conduct Competitor Research
Similar to audience research, competitor research can open up a world of possibilities.
You should aim to research direct and indirect competitors, focusing on what they post and where.
This is especially useful if their target audience is similar or even identical to yours. Focus on the metrics of their posts before breaking down why the post was or was not successful.
These findings will play a prominent role in your new social media strategy.
5. Provide Value
The key to social media marketing is to provide value. This can be through educational, inspirational, or motivational posts. You’ll need to know what your audience is hungry for so you can then cook them up some content with value sauce.
People act when they are triggered to act. Therefore, providing value will create an emotional response, particularly if you address a pain point and offer a solution.
Social Media Marketing Revolves Around Engagement
Social media plays such a pivotal role in our lives in 2021. Being a business owner nowadays means leveraging the power of social media to benefit our businesses.
However, it’s not as easy as simply posting a few cute photos.
Everything needs to be underpinned with strategy, with a solid reason for posting that particular piece of content.
Use the 5 methods above to keep your audience engaged on social media so you can build a presence and grow your business.