I am delighted to share a guest blog post from Lilach Bullock. Thank you for featuring this month Lilach!
When it comes to social media marketing, there is only one metric that truly matters: engagement. Where there's engagement, there are all the other good parts that come with social media: more clicks and traffic, increased brand reach, more shares and so on. So, how can you grow your social media engagement in an organic manner? In this blog post, I'm going to share my 5 top tips for how to get more engagement from your social media profiles.
Before we go into the tips, though, I think it's worth mentioning the importance of being as active as possible on social media. Without being active, it will be very difficult to build successful social media profiles that drive real results – traffic, engagement, awareness and so on. Ideally, set aside some time every day to go onto your social media and genuinely engage with your followers and other users.Now, without further ado, let's get into the 5 top tips to get more engagement from your social media:
Social media influencers are more popular than ever in 2017, and influencer marketing has grown right along with their popularity. Although social influencers don't necessarily have huge audiences, what they do have is engaged, targeted audiences that they have influence over. That means that the endorsement of a social influencer - anything from a share on social media to them writing a product review for you - can have a big impact on your success.
One of the ways that you can benefit from social influencers is to connect with them via social media and engage with them, so that in time, they start sharing more of your content and engaging with you, which then helps improve your own engagement.To find influencers, you can use a tool like Agorapulse to find influencers already following you (which is perfect, as it already provides with an in) and Buzzsumo to find other influencers in your niche.Then, start by following them on social media and their blog, and connecting with them, but sharing their content, liking it, leaving comments and generally engaging with them as much as possible. Just by connecting with them in this way, it can help improve your engagement in time, as more people will following you and engage with you, simply based on your association with certain influencers.
As I mentioned a bit earlier, in order to get more engagement on social media, you need to be as active as possible and engage as much as possible in return. Another good, similar way of boosting your engagement (and meeting new people) is to join various, relevant social media groups and participate as much as possible.Groups offer a great way to meet new people and engage with them. Make sure to focus on finding groups that are very active and preferably also used by relevant social influencers. Then, all you need to do is join them, and be as active as you can - share useful tips, ask and answer questions and try to be helpful. And, very importantly, don't try to sell to these groups, but rather focus on creating organic engagement.
Another way of boosting your engagement rate is to simply go looking for it yourself. What this means is, it's using monitoring to find people that you can befriend on social media and to find conversations that you can join in.The way to do this is, first to get a social media monitoring tool. It can be a more complex monitoring tool like Brand24, or it can be your own social media management tool, such as the afore-mentioned Agorapulse. Then, it's time to go looking for engagement. To do this, simply enter a list of relevant keywords that you think your target audience would be likely to use, and set up an ongoing search for these words.
With some tools, you can take this search a bit further and fine tune it by also entering words to be ignored in the mentions found, adding a certain location and so on. Once the search is set up, all you have to do is check regularly to see what mentions it finds. From there, it's just a question of finding any conversations happening in real time that you can join. Make sure to check the searches you set regularly and to leave some time free as often as possible to engage with the users you find this way.
Another way of boosting your engagement (and, possibly, of also learning something new) is to participate in Twitter Chats in your niche. For example, you can check the social influencers that you found earlier to see if they are holding (or taking part in) any Twitter Chat that you can join.What I love about Twitter Chats is that they are genuinely good way of meeting new, interesting people, plus they can help boost your following and engagement. Once you find a Twitter Chat to join, make sure you offer it your full attention and that you're actively participating and asking/answering questions.
It's no secret that visual content tends to attract quite a bit more engagement than regular, text-only content. This year, try to use more visual content in your updates, as it can help you not only with the engagement you get, but also help you grow your following. It's important here to try to diversify your content as much as possible. Don't just use images, but also try to use GIFs and videos. Live streams are still extremely popular (and they're definitely given a push by Facebook's algorithm to make sure they're seen by as many people as possible) and they attract a lot of engagement usually, so if you have an opportunity for a good live stream, take it.Otherwise, try to use images for all the content you share on social media, create images specifically for a social network (such as, for example, a motivational quote image for Facebook) or use GIFs to introduce some humour in the updates you post on Twitter. The more visual content, the better!
Getting enough engagement on social media can be quite difficult, particularly when you are in the beginning and there aren't enough followers and fans to engage with. But with a few easy "tricks" you can boost your engagement quickly and efficiently. And with more engagement, you also get more shares, more clicks, more traffic to your website and an increased reach on social media. What are some of your best tips to help you generate more engagement on social media?
Working with clients Nationwide from base in Mullingar.
