5 Best Ways to Increase Social Media Engagement for Your Small Business

You are probably reading this because you want to answer one specific question. How can I increase social media engagement? Social is an important communication channel for brands to engage with their audience and most consider it to be the biggest part of their overall marketing strategy.

Leveraging social to promote products and services is important but without the proper engagement your posts may fall flat. Driving engagement is equal to driving conversion, and an audience who knows and trusts your brand can drive sales!

Well, it’s going to take some work and time but here are 5 of the best places to start your road to better social media engagement and potential conversions.

Create Original and Engaging?Visuals

Always include an image but most important include an original and relevant one. Show off your product or topic with a unique visual that will engage your audience. Stay on topic and use various types of images, graphics or gifs to promote your post. There are also numerous tools like Canva and Piktochart that can help you design unique images with custom texts, colors and more.

Create More Video?Content

Taking it up a notch from image content would be posting more videos. Videos bring a stimulating change to your usual post content. Video content gets more exposure and performs best with most social channel algorithms. Typically due to the fact that it captures a viewer’s attention for much longer and has a longer shelf life.

Schedule for the Right?Time

Find out when your followers are online and then schedule your posts accordingly. Reviewing your insights and seeing when your audience is on and active allows for the opportunity of increased engagement. Since users aren’t on all the time and best post times can vary by channel, time zone, and target demo it’s best to run a few tests to see what times work best on each platform. Use management platforms like Hootsuite or Buffer.com to help keep track of posts, see insights and manage content.

Using Trending and Buzz?Content

While most of your posts may reach many of your existing followers, using trending topics and buzz word hashtags will help you engage people who aren’t already following you. When you use relevant trending hashtags and content you can improve your chance of finding new users to increase engagement. Do some research on trending topics and use tools like Hashtagsforlikes.co or hashtagify.me to find quality and relevant hashtags that can help you increase your awareness, reach and overall engagement.

Feature Fans and Customers

User-generated content is gold and helps build trust with your audience. It can help increase your brand’s search rankings, credibility, and overall engagement. Over 80% of consumer’s purchase decisions are influenced by peer social media posts.?

By leveraging your fans’ content you can create meaningful relationships that foster long-term engagement. Find this content by searching your brand on social channels or asking for users to participate and provide content through hashtags.

When appropriately moderated, user-generated content can be a powerful tool for your website both for SEO and for user experience. User-generated content (UGC) doesn’t have to be complicated or intensive; it can simply be a user review on a product on your e-commerce site, a comment on a blog article, or a Q&A section where people can ask questions and get the answers they need.

It’s Now Up to?You

These are just a few ways to increase engagement that are highly effective but remember to be active, post consistently, monitor your channel metrics, use tools, and develop an authentic brand voice. Improving your social engagement can lead to rapid fire growth for your business and help build your brand’s identity creating a valuable way to connect with your customers.

Don’t make it difficult just remember to post relevant content, interact often, set measurable goals and stick to it!