How to Increase Social Media Engagement and Best Practices to Follow!

Why new business should invest in Social Media

If you would have asked us 10 years back that what is the relevance of social media or platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest. The answer would be not much relevant because internet penetration was not much into tier 2 or tier 3 cities. But today, most people having an internet connection and a smartphone uses social media. It has entirely changed the way business, entrepreneurs, and big companies do business.

According to Oberlo, 3.78 Bn users are on social media worldwide with Facebook on top. (https://www.oberlo.com/blog/social-media-marketing-statistics).

Social media helps business to grow traffic on websites as half of people tend to visit a website if they like your social media profile and every business wants to tap these audiences and sell its products and services. Social media provides the correct channel to communicate the brand message and spread brand awareness for a newly launched business into the market. But sometimes it becomes difficult to manage all these social media platforms as time is scarce and there’s so much to do in order to maintain good relations with the audience. So, let’s deep dive into this.

How to Manage Multiple Social Media Profiles

1. Research about the customers: It is essential to know the demographic profile of the customer. What is their age, what is their taste and preferences, what is their gender, what is their religious beliefs. All these things provide an analysis as to what your customer looks like and how he/she thinks which can help to curate content with less time and provide more time to increase engagement with existing audience.
2. Scheduling the Posts: It can happen that you are the sole person managing all the social media handles for your new business or may a small team. Which means you have got to post daily on each platform and content might vary according to the age group, taste and preferences on each platform. Missing the right time to post on any social media account can result in less engagement and ultimately decreased revenues. So, business can use social media tools that helps to schedule a post well in advance so that you don’t miss any deadlines and stay ahead of the competition. (https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-scheduling-tools/)
3. Monitor Analytics: All social media platforms provide engagements of the respective social media accounts. How many followers were increased during a particular week/month or how many likes or URL visits were increased and at what time during the day a post got most of the engagement levels. These analytics helps a business to gain insights on how the current social media strategy is performing and what can be the next steps in this process to make informed decisions.
4. Find the Balance between Quality and Quantity: Often, business focus too much on posting the content on their social media handles that they forget to maintain the quality of the content. It is important to understand that what is the right number of posts that should be posted during a day. For example, a business might be posting 2 or 3 times during a day but receiving less engagement as compared to a business in the same industry who is posting once a day but receiving twice engagement from that single post only. Competitor research can prove helpful here as it determines the competitor’s strategy and the best practices to follow once you have all the data.
5. Social Media Strategy: Developing a social media strategy should be the second step after researching about the customer demographics. It includes establishing goals and initiatives that helps business to reach a certain level in short period of time. Social media strategy includes type of content that should be posted, budget for paid promotions, how much time should be given to each social media platform and much more.
6. Hiring a social media agency: Outsourcing always helps. Social media agencies know what are the right steps and have exposure to manage different social media platforms that probably a new business might not have. This eventually saves a lot of money as sales increases and time too. This time can be utilized in other activities such as improving the website or developing a robust marketing strategy.

How to Increase Social Media Engagement

1. Build Brand Awareness: Developing a brand from scratch that should be remembered by your customers is a difficult task but not impossible. New business should focus on building brand awareness on social media before increasing engagement levels. Brand awareness is all about quality, content, consistency, creativity, and innovation in the way a business sells its products or services.
2. Brand Hashtag: First step for every business should be to create a brand hashtag that can be used on each and every platform. The hashtag should be short which can be easily remembered by your customers.
3. Brand Colors: Using consistent brand colors and design on each platform will help customers to recognize your brand even after so fierce competition in the market. As a best practice, you can take colors from brand logo or use similar colors that were used on website to create posts, images, and videos.
4. High Quality Photos and Videos: Graphics and quality plays an important role in increasing the engagement levels of a brand. People tend to see a video rather than reading a long description.
5. 80/20 Rule: Brands often forget this 80/20 rule and end up creating content images that have text on 80% of the image. This is recognized by the social media algorithms and they give less reach to a post. Always create posts that have less text only on the 20% area of the image of video and rest should be a high quality graphic image that tells what the brand or that particular post is trying to say to the customer. (https://www.brandmuscle.com/resources/the-80-20-rule-explained/#:~:text=The%2080%2F20%20rule%20indicates,should%20explicitly%20promote%20your%20business.)
6. Engaging with Audience: Brands often makes this mistakes by not interacting with the audience through DM’s or comments or story reposts but this is the most important factor. Once you start interacting with your audience, they will feel appreciated that their efforts are being recognized and they will interact more with your posts, stories, and participate in any events published by you.
7. Hosting Giveaways/Events: Organizing a giveaway or event is the best method to increase engagement levels on the social media. You can ask the audience to like, share, tag people in the comment in order to enter the contest and receive a prize. You can scan through all the participants and at the end announce a random winner that gets a prize or samples of your products or free services for some time. This helps to increase engagements levels quickly.

Conclusion

The presence of social media is growing and more business are marketing on social media to increase website traffic, sales, and brand reach to the potential and existing customers. If you’re not marketing on social media in today’s era then you’re making a big mistake. So, start doing social media marketing today and utilize each platform by following the practices, strategies and activities mentioned in the blog.