Brands, organizations and institutions use social media platforms every day to connect with their audiences, raise awareness and drive leads and business. Your social media accounts literally can make or break your business. Promoting your brand through social media is therefore vital to your business but getting your content on these platforms isn’t what gets you the sales. As a business, it’s quality, not just quantity, that you should be striving for. The key is to have followers who’ll actively engage with your content, share it, and ultimately, become paying customers.
Follow these top 7 tips for increasing social media engagement to achieve business growth.
1. Share more video
Video is the most engaging type of content on every social media platform, so if you can, it’s a good idea to create at least one type of video content to maximize engagement. You should upload your videos directly to your social media account, rather than sharing a link of a website so that your video will auto-play to grab your audiences’ attention.
2. Add subtitles to your videos
Did you know that 85% of all social media videos are watched without sound?
It’s shocking, isn’t it? And 6% of the world’s population is affected by deafness or hearing loss. In fact, 80% of people who use captions aren’t deaf or hard of hearing. That means you could be missing out on connecting with millions of social media users. For that matter, adding subtitles to your videos will make you reach a broader audience.
And that’s not all. Video subtitles also provide an SEO boost. Search engine sites now can crawl videos for content.
You can add subtitles to your videos on all your social media platforms, even to your Instagram stories with useful apps such as Subcap. Subcap allows you to take a video simultaneously or upload a video from the gallery. It automatically transcribes the audio to text. With Subcap, you can easily and automatically add subtitles to your videos in 125 languages and variants.
3. Create polls and surveys
Another good practice for creating engaging social media posts is via the use of polls and surveys. Social media polls and surveys are super simple for obtaining that customer feedback you need quickly.
Voting on a poll allows you to instantly see real-time results. People sometimes just click to see what the results are. Keep this irresistibility factor in mind as you create poll questions and response options.
4. Get the timing right for your posts
Publishing posts at times when your target customers are most likely active is one of the best ways to ensure your followers will see your content giving you the best chance of generating engagement. The secret behind a successful social media post is to share the right post at the right time. No matter how strong your marketing campaign is, timing is a crucial factor. If you do not publish your posts at the right times, you may not get the results you want.
5. Be proactive in listening to and responding to your online community
Did you know that 83% of your Facebook fans, and 71% of your Twitter followers, now expect a response from you on the same day when they ask a question on each platform?
Listen to their needs and respond accordingly. When you make your online community feel heard and acknowledged, they’re more likely to become fans and your most loyal social media ambassadors.
6. Use analytics tools to monitor engagement
Analytics Tools are really helpful in monitoring the levels of engagement on social media, websites and more. Data from your analytics also ensure you get more out of the time you spend. For best results, make sure you use the right tools to track your analytics and only track metrics that matter most to your business.
With the help of social media analytics tools, you can understand your audience and your competitors, create better content and better strategy. Make sure to keep tracking regularly so that you catch jumps or dips in engagement that can give you valuable clues about what’s working.
7. Share customer or follower posts
It’s important you share your followers’ and customers’ posts. You should look to publicly recognize people who retweet, favorite, and mention your organization on Twitter, and thank users who comment on Instagram and YouTube. In addition to making the customer feel great about themselves for being worthy to go on your business feed, it can lead to them sharing your reply to them and that means more exposure.