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10 Easy Hacks To Boost Social Media Engagement

July 21, 2017
10:13 AM

Hey did you check out the newly launched smartphone on Facebook? What say! Is it worth buying?
No, no, don’t go away thinking this is an unrelated post.

Here the stated conversation indicates how social media has grown to become an essential part of our daily lives. In early times, when letters or hearsay messages were the means of communication with people across countries, expecting an immediate response or getting heard promptly was next to impossible.

But today, people tweet to get their thoughts across, post on Facebook to speak their mind, log on to Linkedin for better business connections and the list is endless. Social Media has truly taken over the world in every aspect.

Speaking of social media,

What exactly is social media engagement?

Social Media engagement is a series of interactions between the marketers and customers that leads to a long term relationship with the brand. Like every relationship, it requires nurturing with trust, adaptability and a sense of responsibility towards the customers.

For a B2B Marketer, tapping into the true potential of the social media world has become an important requisite to a successful business. According to Aberdeen, 83% of all marketers actively pursue social media marketing initiatives.

But another study shows that only 30% of marketers say they are able to measure their social media ROI. This shows that although B2B marketers seem to be realizing the significance of customer engagement on social media, yet there is a lot to be learned & explored. So let’s explore 10 simple hacks that can help you engage more prospects in the social media world.

Choose the right platform

Knowing which social media platform attracts the interests of your target audience is one of the most basic things for a social media marketer. Selecting the platform where you can interact with your target audience in large numbers raises the probability of lead acquisition and conversion.

For instance, Media brands are the most active whereas business services, financial services, and fast-moving consumer goods have the lowest percentage of brands represented on Instagram. It is also important to understand the changing preferences of your target audience and what attracts them to social media as a whole for better and faster engagement.

Be authentic & adopt better

It’s human nature to connect with what is most relatable. In the highly competitive social media world, it is important to connect with the audience through your own thoughts & aspirations rather than building up fake expectations that are sure not to be realized.

Don’t imitate someone else, don’t try to be someone you’re not. If you love knitting and are great at it, share that! If being grammatically correct is your obsession, share that! If you don’t understand certain features of a gadget, share that! People tend to relate more to your imperfections rather than your far-fetched promises. Being authentic and real in your posts helps to build trust among your prospects & to stay ahead of the competition.

Adaptability is an irreplaceable aspect of the customer-marketer relationship. Adapting well to the upcoming trends of the social media world helps in getting better leads in more ways than one. For example, Hashtags were a trend that began on Twitter but has now overtaken most social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Google+, etc. Hashtags make it easy for people to follow you even if they aren’t on your friend’s list.

Tweets with hashtags win twice the engagement than the ones without hashtags. In the case of Instagram, the more the number of hashtags with your images, the better the engagement. Hence for better engagement, Get a head start on your competition by adopting early and jump-starting your content marketing in line with the current social network trends.

Optimize post length & timing

Posts that are optimized according to the particular social media platform fare better at winning engagement against those that are not. A study of the table given below highlights the optimal length of posts on different social media networks and their relation to prospect engagement rates.

Optimizing post timing is another hack that can make the engagement rates soar sky-high. Most posts, if not timed properly lose their effectiveness. Try and test possible timings when your target audience is most likely to be active on a particular social media platform so as to increase the chances of engagement.

For example, According to Adweek, the best days to post on Facebook are Thursday and Friday, with engagement rates dropping 3.5 percent below average from Monday to Wednesday. This study also states that 1 PM is the best time to post for shares and 3 PM is the best time to post for clicks. Along with the timing, it is also important to post quality content frequently 7 consistently.

Interactive content that sparks curiosity

Content in every form aids the success of a marketing campaign only if it is of good quality and captures the interest of the audience. Content that sparks intrigue and provokes a reaction can engage much more people compared to content that just gives out facts bluntly.

Thus, by means of the content you post, it’s important to try to bring out a reaction from the reader. Organizing contests or quizzes, conducting surveys, polls, etc can increase your interaction with the target audience & thus aid in better engagement.

Visual content can work wonders

Videos and Infographics have always been the more preferred form in a content marketing campaign. Visual content fares much better than textual content in garnering social media engagement. Studies show that Visual content is more than 40 times likely to get shared on social media rather than other types of content.

Hence, it is important to develop an innovative content marketing strategy with well-designed visual content for better engagement. Moreover, according to a study at Ambassador, 71% of consumers who have had a good social media service experience with a brand are likely to recommend it to others.

Powerful CTAs can do the trick

Stop the scroll with a powerful call-to-action whether it is in the form of a question, provides a link to your website, or asks for a download or subscription. Make it sound intriguing enough to move the prospect into clicking on it.

Try to insert the CTA in the initial part of the post or content rather than the conclusion as some websites like Instagram tend to hide the content once it is shown in the feed. CTAs add a sense of urgency to a post or content and thus makes the content shared on social media fairly actionable, driving reactions & improving engagement.

Ask & answer questions

Ask for feedback on your products or services. Get reactions by using certain specialized features of social media platforms like Facebook which has recently introduced emojis like wow, sad, angry, love, etc. Get your social media followers to speak for your brand. Crowdsourcing is lately becoming the most adopted method of driving customer engagement. Answering questions on sites like Quora helps to build a positive brand image and contributes to its credibility.

Share your thoughts on groups & forums

Getting connected with your target audience requires you to develop a connection with their interests. So what better way to do just that than by joining groups, communities, and forums where your audience is most active? This not only increases the possibility of interactions but also helps you understand the buyer persona better. Sharing posts on these groups on social media is a surefire way of increasing prospect engagement.

Posting guest blogs can boost your campaign

Guest blogs are a good means of showing off your blogging prowess to the social media world. Swapping unique articles and blogs with other organizations can help boost your brand image and also improve the engagement rates significantly.

Use word press plug-ins to acquire an advantage

Word Press Plugins are definitely a hack that you should try to boost your Social media engagement. These include:

Click To Tweet– Boost sharing on Twitter with short tweetable snippets
Facebook Like Box Widget– Increase your Facebook likes and shares
LinkedIn Master– Combine your personal or corporate LinkedIn account
SumoMe– Excellent social sharing plug-in that has numerous functions

Thus, there are a several hacks to achieve better success rates by using social media networks. But it’s crucial that every marketer remembers to prioritize the prospect while trying to better their engagement. Listen more than talk about your products, bring humor in your content, make it interactive & compelling, & most importantly build trust with your prospects to acquire quality leads, nurture and convert them to reap sales success.

Show some love!

Amberlynn Adam

Blogger, Content Developer & Editor. Amberlynn is a Content Marketing Professional and is an integral part of DataCaptive since its inception. She holds a passion for tracking new changes in the ever-evolving business world and putting them down in the form of blogs to encourage intelligent discussions & thought exchange. Apart from writing, reading fiction and thriller novels are her major interests.

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