A good social media strategy is an essential component of any modern digital marketing campaign. With around 2.5 billion users around the world, social media websites can provide the perfect platform for businesses to connect with their target market and drive a huge amount of traffic to their website.
But to really take advantage of all social media has to offer, internet marketers have to successfully compete with thousands of competitors for the attention of your customers – and that means focusing on engagement. Without engagement, you may as well be shouting into an empty room.
Here are five ways to boost engagement so that you get more out of your social media marketing campaign.
1. Add Images
Most people who browse social media scroll down their feed without reading the reams and reams of text that show up. To get their attention, you have to first catch their eye and make them stop to read more.
The best way to do this is by using images. Obviously, that’s a given for image-based platforms like Pinterest and Instagram, but images should be incorporated in your other social media platforms too.
On Facebook, for example, studies have shown that incorporating images can lead to an 85% increase in interaction rates and a 35% increase in shares.
2. Use Humour
One of the most powerful tools for boosting engagement is to make your content funny. People use social media to interact with their family and friends, and friends like to make each other laugh. For this reason, the content that goes viral tends to be content that makes us laugh, as it’s instantly shareable.
Think about the viral memes, challenges, videos that you’ve come across and you’ll probably find that most of them are funny.
3. Ask a Question
Three of the biggest engagement statistics are likes, shares, and comments – and what better way to get people to like, share, and comment on your content than by simply asking for it?
Incorporate a question in your post that your audience will be eager to answer, and they’ll be more likely to respond. As an example, imagine you were creating a post advertising your hotel resort which included a swimming pool. Instead of using a caption that said ‘check out our amazing pool!’, you could ask ‘who would you take a dip with?’.
The latter caption encourages your customers to comment and tag their friends, boosting both comments and shares.
4. Incorporate Giveaways
People like free stuff – it goes without saying. It doesn’t take much for your customer to like and share your posts, and they’re more likely to do so if they can get something out of it. Consider offering a giveaway which requires people to like and share the photo to be entered into the prize draw.
The prize doesn’t have to be big, but it can generate a huge amount of engagement without taking a huge chunk out of your marketing budget!
5. Use the Right Hashtags
On Instagram and Twitter, the best way to get your content seen is to use hashtags. Selecting the right hashtags should, therefore, be the top of your priority list. You want to research popular hashtags relevant to your niche – the kind of hashtags your target customers are likely to be searching.
On Instagram, you also want to choose a mix of high-volume hashtags and lower-volume ones. That way, you can use the larger hashtags to have the largest possible reach, but stand a better chance of dominating the search results for the lower-volume hashtags. If you choose your hashtags carefully and craft an engaging post, those Instagram likes should come flooding in.
Alternatively, and especially if you are just starting out on Instagram, you can boost the post with Instagram likes from Instagram Ads or third-party digital marketing agency to start kick-start the engagement. This will help you reach top positions for the selected keywords and get more eyeballs on your content.
