11 Ideas to Spark Your Social Media Engagement

Welcome to the 5th part of Social Media Success (SMS) series where today we dive into learn some great Social Media engagement tactics.

Social Media engagement is an essential thing for any company. It indicates prospects like you. And when prospects like you, it becomes easier to convert them into customers.

What is social media engagement?

Social media engagement isn’t interacting with a single customer on social media. It is building a relationship with all your customers over a long period of time.

For example, think about people you’ve met in real life.

You tend to trust someone you’ve known for months or years than someone you met yesterday, last week or month. Social media works much like that.

Don’t forget that social media is where people connect, associate with each other, and share content just like we do offline.

Here are some brilliant ideas to get ahead:

1. Initiate Conversation with Your Social Media Followers

One of the fastest ways to get engagement on social media is to initiate a conversation. For example, Manchester United is a successful football (soccer) club in the United Kingdom. See how they are initiating a conversation with their incredible fans that span across different parts of the world.

2. Share Videos

It’s safe to say that sharing videos will help you engage your fans and followers.If you’re looking for social video ideas, consider how-to, entertainment, behind-the-scenes, culture, recruiting, response, shout-out, event, promotional, demonstration, interview, and even customer testimonials.

The best video length for Facebook engagement is about 1 minute and 30 seconds, and Twitter’s direct upload maximum length is 2 minutes and 20 seconds. So you could smartly record one video and share it across multiple networks, then also upload it to YouTube for additional exposure.

Facebook recommends that storytelling via video keeps your audience interested. Emotion drives action.

3. Curate And Share Others’ Valuable Content

Social media content curation presents an awesome opportunity to tag the authors behind the pieces you’re sharing. This recognizes the talent you thought worthy enough to share with your followers while giving your audience the chance to discover even more engaging content.

4. Use Images, Memes, And Animated GIFs To Increase Shares And Clickthroughs

Tweets with images get 18% more click-throughs than those without. And tweets with animated GIFs get 167% more click-throughs than tweets with images. Memes bring humor to busy news feeds (and let’s just remember that half of all people share entertaining content).

Let’s just say it’s widely known that social media messages with visuals get more engagement.

Find inspiration for visual content:

·        Look to GIPHY, PopKey, and reddit’s top GIFs sub-reddit for animated GIFs. GIPHY also has a GIF maker to help you make your own GIFs.

·        You can also check reddit’s home page for memes and more, or try a site like memes.com to make your own.

·        There are also dozens of tools to help you make your own engaging images and graphics for your social media messages.

5. Reshare evergreen content

Resharing evergreen content on your blog can boost your social shares and give new life to old content that still has a lot of juice in it. Use captivating headlines for social media.

Also, use WordPress’ social plugins that can help you increase your social media engagement.

Some of them are:

·        Click To Tweet – Increase Twitter sharing with short tweetable snippets

·        Facebook Like Box Widget – Boost your Facebook likes and followers

·        SumoMe – Awesome social sharing plugin with multiple functions

·        Official Twitter Plugin – Embed Twitter content and grow your audience

·        LinkedIn Master – Integrate your personal or company LinkedIn page

6. Include Games, Contests and Giveaways

There’s no doubt that you’ve heard about the power of contests and giveaways. What’s great about these tactics is that it boosts engagement on the social media platform of your choice because people usually like receiving a prize of recognition. For example, you could ask followers to fill-out an entry form, like your page or share their favorite story about your brand for a chance to win a free product or subscription from your brand. Giving away something is key.

Besides contests and giveaways, you can also use games to get your audience more active. In fact, you could even utilize some classic and easy-to-play games like Mad Libs, Hangman or Boggle. Hootsuite suggests games like “What’s Your Best Guess?” “Ask The Next Friend,” or asking “If your life/business was a (movie/book/song), which one would it be?” are all easy-to-implement games that will generate buzz around your social media account.

7. Show Your Personality

Your followers and audience want to see that there’s actually a person or people behind the logo. But, how can you achieve that? For starters, you can share some personal information like your favorite hobby or book with your followers. You could also share recommendations on blog posts or products that you find informative. You could even tell your followers about what your typical day is like.

8. Ask Specific, Pointed Questions

Asking straightforward questions is the fastest way to get people talking on social media. It’s not hard to do. Just ask followers about something they care deeply about. You’ll be amazed by the amount of response you will receive.

Another idea would be to hold a frequent Q&A on Google Hangouts, Twitter, Reddit, etc. It gives fans the opportunity to ask you questions about products, services, etc. and become a valued member of your community.

9. Syndicate your blog content

You can grow your blog by syndicating your content on sites with a much larger audience. If you want to target the B2B segment, sites like Quora and Business2Community are ideal to post on.

Considering that their updates go out to millions of readers, your content is bound to get noticed a lot more if you syndicate it there.

10. Promote User-Generated Content to Your Fans

What are the good things customers are saying about you on social media?Don’t repeat what they said.Instead, promote it.How do you do that?

You can share or retweet what a happy customer said. Others will jump in the conversation and take it further.

11. Be Active on Social Media

Very serious about increasing engagement on social media? It’s simple:

·        Be extremely active.

·        Post content on a regular basis.

·        Follow active social media users.

·        Retweet and re-share other people’s content.

·        Join trending conversations.

·        And help a lot of people on social media, every day.

After all, it’s about helping others find useful information and having fun in it. If you like this article, you may follow us on Facebook as well!