Social listening that you learn from the previous post not only helps you understand your target audience better, but it also increases their engagement with your brand. So how can we boost current and potential customers’ engagement on social media?

Engagement refers to the actions people take on social media, such as likes, favorites, comments, shares, retweets, saves, clicks, hashtags, and mentions. Studying engagement can help you determine whether the content you’re creating resonates with your audience.

Social media engagement

One way to increase your audience engagement on social media is by connecting with them. Social media is an ideal channel for making meaningful connections with your customers and potential customers. A report by Sprout Social found that when customers feel connected to a brand, more than half of them will increase their spending on that brand. More than three-quarters will continue to buy from them rather than from a competitor.

To engage people on social media you need to be social with them. It means communicating with your customers and followers frequently. It’s like being the host of a party. You’re not always going to be the center of attention, but you want to make sure everyone is having a good time. A best practice is to respond to comments and mentions or users talking about your brand. It opens up two-way communication and can help you establish a healthy, meaningful relationship with your customers.

Provide excellent customer service on your social media platforms. Be prepared to answer customers’ questions, provide a resource that can help them with their issues, and show empathy for any challenges they’ve faced related to your brand. When customers reach out to you on social media, be sure to respond to them quickly.

Listening and responding to customers rapidly, makes them feel heard and shows them that you care. A speedy response can also lead to increased customer satisfaction and trust in your brand.

It’s important to develop an authentic personal voice on social media. People are more likely to engage with your brand when they feel like an actual person is reading and responding to comments. You can make your voice on social media more personal by doing things like signing off on your posts, addressing customers by their first names, and responding to comments with humor or warmth. Showing images or videos of employees can also help your brand seem more personable and relatable. 

It is important to know the audience you’re trying to engage on social media. The language you use, the tone of your posts, and the images you present will differ depending on the audience.

Knowing the audience also means creating valuable content for them. What can you teach them? How can you inspire them? What resources can you provide? Engaging with your customers by giving them helpful content that addresses their needs and pain points proves you’re a credible source of information in your industry. Sharing your expertise builds their trust. It is also a way to connect with your target audience about the topics they’re interested in.

Get creative with your posts to encourage people to engage with your brand on social media. You can entice people to engage with you by holding contests, posting polls, developing quizzes, asking questions, spotlighting customers and employees, eliciting user-generated content, offering coupons and discounts, and offering giveaways in exchange for followers, likes, retweets, or tags.

When customers are engaged on social media, you can learn from them, better meet their needs, and increase their confidence in your brand.

Respond to social media users

When a customer reaches out to you on social media – whether it’s via direct message, a comment on a post, or any other type of interaction – a reply is usually needed. Sometimes, however, a reply isn’t the best course of action.

Why is it important to reply?

Replying to comments, mentions, messages, and tags are a great way to engage with the audience. It makes customers feel heard. You also appear accessible to those who read your replies. It indicates that your brand cares about customer experience.

How should you respond?

• Responding to positive feedback. Acknowledge the comment, thank them for the kind words, and consider reposting or retweeting their feedback. It will say a lot about your brand so consider it a good strategy to ensure that a lot of people see it.
• Responding to questions or general feedback. Reply briefly and with clear enthusiasm. Engaging with customers should be fun and informative for both parties, and your customers should be able to tell you’re having fun based on the type of responses you give. Don’t be afraid to use creative language and exclamation marks, if it aligns with your brand voice.
• Responding to negative comments. It is best to remain calm and use useful, polite, and approachable language. If there is a clear issue that has the potential to become something larger, you may have to offer refunds or promotional codes to make things right. Encourage them to send you a direct message so the issue can be resolved quickly and privately. However, if the response could be helpful to other people who may have the same concerns or thoughts as the original poster, you may choose to answer it publicly so everyone can benefit from the interaction.
• Responding to internet trolls. The short answer is: don’t. An internet troll is a person who intentionally antagonizes others online by posting inflammatory, unnecessary, or offensive comments or other disruptive content that shouldn’t necessarily be replied to. Unfortunately, trolling is a reality of social media. If you know your brand didn’t do anything wrong, simply don’t reply. If the trolling gets worse, consider deleting the comments or hiding the replies.

Increase your followers on Twitter

A follower is someone who opts in to receive updates from a business or brand on a social media platform. Followers have chosen to see all of the posts of another user, like a friend or a business in their news feed. As we discussed, engagement measures how people interact with your social media content, such as by liking or sharing it. People like, share, or Retweet posts they find value in.

On the other hand, people follow a brand or business when they’re interested in getting frequent updates from them. Gaining followers on social media campaign success. Increasing your followers indicates that you’re posting relevant, engaging content and have influence in the space. Followers are important because you can reach them with your organic content every time you post.

You’ll want to employ different tactics to increase your followers and all of your social media platforms. These tactics will differ from one platform to another based on a variety of factors, such as how the platform works or which segments of your audience visit that platform most often.

Twitter is designed to encourage conversations in the form of short frequent messages. These are called tweets. A tweet is any message posted on Twitter and may contain elements like text, photos, videos, links, and audio. Twitter is a useful platform for connecting and developing relationships with your audience.

To increase your followers on Twitter as on any social media platform, you’ll want to actively engage with your audience often. You can do this by linking, tagging, retweeting, or replying to other people’s tweets. It shows that you’re human and helps more people discover your brand.

Feeds on Twitter move quickly, so you should tweet frequently. Posting new content often can help you maximize engagement and increase followers. Social media calendar can help you plan and publish content prompt.

Another tactic is to effectively use hashtags. Hashtags make your posts searchable, kind of like SEO for your Twitter account. Therefore, adding a couple of hashtags to each of your tweets can help new followers find your account. Be careful not to include too many hashtags in your tweets as this can be distracting.

You can also attract followers by adding eye-catching visuals to your tweets. This could include anything from photographs to infographics, to user-generated content. Images are more effective than texts at grabbing people’s attention and encouraging them to take a look at your post.

One Twitter feature that can help you guide users to your profile is a Twitter bio. Twitter bio allows you to introduce your brand. They help you share what you do, describe your products or services and describe what makes your brand special all in 160 characters or fewer. The most effective Twitter bios are creative, original and capture your brand’s personality. Be sure to add keywords and links to your website.

Finally, one more way to increase your followers on Twitter is to promote your social media account through other marketing channels, such as email, your website, or materials in your store.

There are many ways to gain followers on social media and the strategies you use will differ somewhat from platform to platform. The best practices above can be applied on several different platforms to help you increase your followers and your overall social media engagement.

Influencer marketing

You probably heard of influencers a lot. An influencer is a person with the ability to influence potential buyers of a product or service by promoting or recommending the items on social media. If an influencer recommends a product and you buy it, you have been influenced.

Influencer marketing is when a brand collaborates with an online influencer to market its products or services. In 2021 alone, it’s estimated that brands spent $13.8 billion on influencer marketing.

Different types of influencers

Influencers span all industries and subject matters. There are influencers in the beauty, art and design, food, home organization spaces, and many others. Today, anyone can be an influencer. All it takes is having a large and/or engaged social media following.

The influencer’s number of followers determines their category:

• Nano-influencers: 10,000 followers or fewer
• Micro-influencers: between 10,000 and 100,000 followers
• Macro-influencers: between 100,000 and 1 million followers
• Mega-influencers: 1 million or more followers

Importance of influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is wildly successful on social media and has become an important tactic for brands trying to leverage social media to bring in revenue. According to the influencer Marketing Hub, 67% of brands on Instagram use influencer marketing. In a recent benchmark report, Influencer Marketing Hub found an average return on investment (ROI) of $5.78 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing.

Tips on selecting influencers for your campaign

Although partnering with mega influencers would be the most effective for your brand, it often results in low engagement compared to smaller following influencers. For instance, micro-influencers can get an estimated engagement of 3.86%, while engagement for mega-influencers is estimated at just 1.21%.

If you are running a campaign in which you aim to increase engagement, conversions, sales, or followers, consider using influencers with smaller followings that align with your target audience to drive higher engagement rates. However, if your campaign goal is to hit a certain number of views or impressions, you may want to target influencers with large followings. Regardless of your goals, make sure you’ve done your research on each potential influencer. Run audits on their social media accounts, or reach out to them to ask for the metrics you’re interested in.

A quick tip: you’ll need to be organized and detail-oriented when creating an influencer marketing plan. Remember that although you and your influencer both represent your respective business, you’re speaking person-to-person. Have an open conversation about the benefits of partnering, and when addressing any concerns, be diplomatic.

Social marketing on mobile

Mobile marketing is a digital marketing strategy aimed at reaching your target audience on their smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices. Mobile marketing can reach users through many channels, including websites, email, and social media. Social media and mobile marketing go hand in hand because people are increasingly accessing social media content from their mobile devices. In July 2021, over 98% of users worldwide accessed Facebook from their smartphones. Because of this, your social media marketing strategy should incorporate mobile marketing.

Mobile marketing on social media offers the following benefits:

• High engagement
• Wide reach
• Increased conversion rates
• Effective user targeting
• Opportunities to make personal connections with customers
• Quick customer response time
• Access to user-generated content
• Easy-to-track results

Mobile social media marketing tips

Here are some tips to incorporate mobile marketing into your social media marketing strategy:

Create mobile-friendly posts

Be sure to test all of your layouts and images on mobile because what looks good on the desktop is not necessarily look good on mobile devices. Make sure any links in your posts lead to mobile-optimized landing pages. You should also keep mobile users in mind when creating written content. People generally don’t want to read long articles on their phones, so focus on creating shorter posts.

Integrate video

Users engage more with video than other types of content on their mobile devices, so include videos in your posts often. That being said, people have short attention spans when they are on their phones. Therefore, be sure to highlight important points or product features at the beginning of videos, and keep your videos short (15 to 30 seconds). Live video is another engaging option for mobile marketing. You can broadcast live from your business on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram Live, or another platform to generate interest and engagement.

Ask customers to check in

Asking customers to “check-in” at your business on social media is a great way to gain earned media. Checking in lets customers’ friends and followers on social media know that they are patronizing your business. Offering incentives like discounts, coupons, and rewards programs can encourage customers to check-in.

Encourage user-generated content

User-generated content, or UGC, is any kind of content created by people, rather than brands. People enjoy content from actual customers because it feels authentic and trustworthy. User-generated content is also convenient for customers to create and post on social media from their mobile devices. To encourage users to submit UGC, you can run contests inviting customers to post photos or videos of themselves using your product or service.

Leverage influencer marketing

Mobile marketing is convenient for influencers because they can promote brands remotely. To build a collaboration with an influencer, find one who shares your target audience, uses the same platforms as your target audience, and has a great connection with followers.

A successful social media marketing strategy will include mobile marketing. Integrating social media and mobile marketing has many benefits, including a wide reach, high engagement, and increased conversions. The tactics discussed above are just a few ways to leverage mobile to maximize the results of your social media marketing campaigns. As both mobile and social media continue to grow and evolve, stay informed about the latest trends to keep your campaigns relevant and achieve better results.

Happy learning and good luck!