7 Tips for Increasing Your Social Media Engagement

accessible social media

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.

Soc,al media videos

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.

 

 

How to Be More Accessible on Social Media

When the internet came into our lives, the Web have become a significant resource in many aspects of life. To provide equal access and equal opportunity to people with diverse abilities, it is important that the websites are accessible. While many organizations are taking the right steps towards a more accessible and inclusive website, the same isn’t necessarily true for their social media channels. While you cannot change the accessibility of the social media platforms, here’s what you can do to make your social media more accessible to provide equal access to your content.

Phone screen showing social media apps in a group of Social Networks

1. Use CamelCase hashtags.

Capitalize the first letter of each word. This is easier for everyone to read and helps automated screen readers to differentiate each word and read out loud. #WriteYourHashtagsThisWay #dontdoitthisway

2. Don’t use too many emojis.

Screen readers have a text description for every emoji. However, when you use too many of them, it might take a long time for a screen reader to read them and to be honest it might also get boring. You wouldn’t want to say “Face with Tongue” five times in a row. 😛😛😛😛😛

3. Avoid GIFs.

On social media platforms, it’s not possible to add alt text to GIFs. So if you insist on using GIFs, you should combine them with some explanation to make them comprehensible.
Moreover, flashing, blinking, flickering and other strong visual images can make it difficult for people with cognitive or learning disabilities to focus on your post.

4. Add subtitles to your videos.

Without subtitles, your videos would exclude the 466 million people worldwide living with some form of hearing loss. This is equivalent to 6% of the world’s population. That means your videos are not accessible to a lot of people.
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 shoot a video simultaneously or upload a video from the gallery. It automatically transcribes the audio to text which you can edit or copy. With Subcap, you can easily and automatically add subtitles to your videos, not only in English but also in 125 languages and variants.

Subcap logo, yellow speech bubble
As a matter of fact, eight out of every ten people prefer to watch videos silently so it’s not just people with disabilities who benefit from accessible social media. Subtitles are helpful for people who are watching videos in a noisy environment, in a quiet place, or without headphones, as well as for children learning to read and those watching videos in a second language.

5. Add image descriptions.

You should add alternate (alt) texts in order to provide a context in place of an image, graphic, and other media. This way, screen readers can describe them for blind and low vision users. Text descriptions should be brief but descriptive.
And don’t forget to write image descriptions for your posts or tweets with screenshots. They might include writing, but screen readers can’t read it unless you add it as an alt text.