In this digital era, having a social media presence is vital to accomplish the best results of your digital marketing strategy. Social media is the best platform to promote your brand as you have direct interaction with the audience. As of 2022, there are 4.55 billion users actively using social media platforms globally. Hence, social media marketing is essential to promote your businesses’ services or products, build your brand, connect with audiences, drive traffic to your website, etc.
The best thing about SMM is that you can control your brands’ appearance. For instance, in which specific location you want to run ads, your target audience, which specific time you want to show your ads, etc., and analyze its data to run your ad campaign effectively.
To get in touch with such a wide audience and make the target audience reach your web page, you need to focus on boosting engagement on social media.
Social media marketing is a vast field and almost split with choices. You can choose one or more platforms according to your business needs to promote your services. Most popular social media platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, Youtube, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc. Modern brands and traditional brands invest heavily in social media marketing to increase visibility and customer engagement on their sites. In this blog, we will explore social media marketing, its importance, different types of social media platforms, social media engagement, how to boost it, etc.
Understanding social media engagement
Social media marketing is promoting a business’s products or services, reaching new customers, connecting with existing ones and building brand awareness. Social media engagement is the part of SMM that helps evaluate how the users interact with your social media post, pages and profiles. A wide range of metrics steers your social media engagement rate, which includes the number of likes, comments, shares, DMs, mentions (tagged or untagged), followers, hashtags, etc. The social media engagement rate can vary from one platform to another.
Social media engagement is a broad term used to evaluate your overall social media performance. Suppose you create a post from your company’s profile promoting your business’s new product, this post appears in users’ news feed and they start interacting with it. Users like it, leave comments, share the post, follows your business page, ask questions, etc. Some users also click through it and explore your website if they find it relevant to gain more information about your company. These all activities count in the engagement on your post.
In your social media marketing strategy, whether you are running PPC ad campaigns or posting products or services of your business, you need to focus on writing engaging and valu-adding content to build brand awareness on social media, increasing traffic on website, etc. Social media engagement metrics indicate how your posts perform, how your audience is engaging with it or the engagement rate, are they finding it exciting and how it helps grow audiences or followers for your business. You need to analyze the performance of various KPIs to take the necessary steps to optimize them.
Why boosting engagement on social media is vital
As of 2021, the active number of social media users is 57.6% of the global population. It means over half of the world’s residents are signed in to at least one social media platform. This is an enticing number and we cannot miss out on targeting our specific audience through social media platforms for brand promotion. Optimizing your social media business profile is as important as the on-page SEO of a website. Following are some of the reasons showing the importance to boost engagement on social media:
- Expand your business – The ultimate goal of most businesses is to expand their network and increase revenue. By boosting the engagement rate on social media, you can achieve this goal as your visibility increases and in turn, customer interaction. It allows any business to reach new customers and connect with existing ones easily. You need to build a strong social media marketing strategy to appear in more people’s news feeds, make your ads appealing to grab users’ attention and improve the click-through rate. This helps you to convert users into potential customers and grow your business.
- Drive traffic to your website or business page – Social networking sites can be a great source of driving traffic to your website or business pages. These platforms keep updating new features and algorithms to give advertisers the best advertising experience to interact with their target audience and achieve business goals.
You should be cautious with your social media content and ensure that they meet the users’ intent. As social media allows you to present yourself more casually, you can write an engaging copy that creates a sense of urgency among the users to click on the post/ad. Social media post should be short, eye-catching and contain critical services of your business that is useful for the users. Long and detailed ad posts may not be much helpful for social media marketing and affect your social media engagement rate.
- Increases the visibility of your business – As of 2021, 84% of the US population is active on at least one social media platform. As social media is accessible to such a large number of audiences, there is also an opportunity for advertisers to increase the visibility of their business. Advertisers need a strong social media marketing strategy to target these audiences. Appearing in your followers’ news feed is easy; however, you need to work on social media optimization strategy to appear in the target audience’s news feed who are yet to get in touch with your business. So, the more social network you build, the more visibility you get for your business. You can easily connect with your target audience through paid services provided by various social networking sites.
Search engines also give space to the company or website’s social media pages in its result pages if appropriately optimized. Therefore, it is beneficial in your digital marketing strategy to create a social page for top social networking platforms. This is part of your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to increase the visibility of your business on search engine result pages.
- Cost-effective brand building – The purpose of most businesses is to build their brand awareness. Various advertisement methods are used, such as running offline ads, PPC ads, display ads, mobile ads, video ads, search ads, etc. But here is one more method you can use to build your brand quickly and effectively.
By boosting engagement on social media, you can attract users to your business page, which can be converted into potential users. You have to create appealing ads and posts that increase the click-through rate and hence the social media engagement rate. Many social media platforms give paid promotion services to their users, which can be very helpful in your social media marketing strategy.
How to boost social media engagement rate
So far, we’ve learned about engagement rate and its importance. In many cases, even after putting in all your efforts, if the engagement rate is not increasing or is significantly less, then following are some methods that can help you to boost your social media engagement rate:
- Run social media contests – People love competitions and winning prizes. To satisfy users’ competitive nature, running interesting social media contests on the subjects like photography, video, poem, essay, recipes or more will be helpful. Promote such posts so that more and more users participate in it. Rewarding people with gift coupons, discounts, incentives, prizes, etc., is exciting for the users and boosts your social media engagement rate.
- Ask users for reviews, feedback and suggestions – Reviews and feedback from customers enhance brands’ authenticity and customer belief. 62% of customers will write a review for you if asked. So, you must try to collect feedback, suggestions and reviews from your customers as it is beneficial for social media marketing strategy. Also, it directly affects the sales and engagement of your social media pages as 80% of customers trust reviews and consider them before shopping.
- Use engaging images & infographics – Images and informative infographics are very helpful in building your social media content. It would be best to consider using images in every post and put in some information related to your business. Create infographics relevant to your brand and regularly upload them as your social media post. Social media users have a short memory span and are almost split with choices. So, images and infographics are more helpful in boosting your engagement rate than long and detailed texts.
- Provide easy customer support – Interacting with customers is essential and beneficial for any business or company. It enhances user experience and brand authenticity. SEO experts also suggest that it is necessary to communicate with your customers, answer their questions, resolve queries, ask for their feedback, etc. If a company has excellent customer service, then 78% of buyers choose their services or products even after a mistake. So, always try to remain interactive with users.
- Create a poll – The audience poll is an exciting activity that attracts new users to your social media page. You can create polls on trending topics, social topics or subjects of public interest. It has enough power to boost your engagement rate rapidly and can be a good part of your social media marketing strategy. You can create polls and invite social media users to participate in them with the help of various social networking sites.
- Put engaging challenges and questions on your page – People like to share their thoughts and play some random fun. It is good to put exciting and tricky questions on your social media post or page so that users can engage with them. Small quizzes and challenges can also help you with the same.
- Create unique hashtags – Nowadays, hashtags (#) are soo popular in social media posts as it is a click-to-connect method. Choose your phrase that best reflects your business and use it as a hashtag. It should be reflected in your social media content, profile and posts. Tell audiences to use these hashtags to connect with your brand quickly.
- Engaging landing page – Landing page experience is one of the factors responsible for enhancing user experience. You should consider optimizing your landing page well and keep the content on it organized so that users can easily explore it. Your social media post or ads should be relevant to the landing page or vice versa. Slow page loading speed is also one factor affecting your user experience and engagement rate. So, try to keep it as fast as possible.
- Create social media groups – Join and create social media groups that are related to your business. It helps to meet with like-minded people interested in your business and provides helpful guidance. It would be best if you tried to be active in the group by uploading social media posts regularly. Almost all social media platforms provide these facilities that you can use according to your business needs.
- Use positive emojis – Social media users like emojis. You should also use them in your social media content to increase your engagement rate. But you should be careful while using them. Always use relevant emojis that spread positive messages like happy, smiley, etc. Avoid negative face emojis as these do not work in your favor.
- Reply to users’ comments – Communicating with your audience via DMs, emails, business chats, or other methods is essential. It increases customer satisfaction and user experience. Social media users expect replies to their comments, especially in the case of a negative one. Therefore, try to communicate with your audience as a part of a better social media marketing strategy.
Top social networking sites
- Facebook – Facebook is one of the top social media platforms with 2.89+ billion monthly active users globally. It was launched in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, headquartered in Menlo Park, California.
Facebook helps people connect with friends and family, find communities and grow businesses. You can use it to promote your brand and increase the engagement rate as more than 200 million businesses use Facebook to reach their customers. Average Facebook user clicks approximately 12 ads per month which means it is a great place to advertise. Regularly post updates from your business page, join or create groups, tag people, use the live video feature, Facebook Messenger chatbot, fill up all sections of your profile, etc., to strengthen your social media marketing strategy. You can also use its paid services to get more features and visibility across users’ news feeds.
- YouTube – YouTube is the world’s most popular video-sharing platform, with over 2 billion monthly logged-in users. It was launched in 2005 by Jawed Karim, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley. YouTube is headquartered in San Bruno, California.
YouTube has a huge user base as it includes users of all age groups and covers all genres. On YouTube, people watch a billion hours of videos daily. So, this is the right place for advertisers to target their audience through video ads. YouTube ads give various options for running advertisements. You can choose audiences according to your business, select the time frame to show your ads, the location in which there is more opportunity for your business to grow and many more.
- LinkedIn – LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional social networking platform, founded in 2003. It is the most focused platform with a network of 810 million active professionals in over 200 countries. Its headquarter is in Sunnyvale, California.
LinkedIn is popular among professionals as it helps in advertising brands, finding the right jobs, internships, learning new skills that help in your career, connecting and learning with professionals, etc. It is a platform for business owners, students and job seekers who want to level up their careers. You can also post photos & videos, organize events, write articles, join groups, etc. Complete your LinkedIn profile to showcase your experience, education, skills and achievements.
- Twitter – Twitter is an American microblogging social networking platform founded in 2006 by Jack Dorsey. Twitter’s headquarter is in San Francisco, California. It has 463 million active users around the world.
Twitter is the best platform to connect with celebrities and world leaders in different fields, including entertainment, sports, politics, tech and marketing. The character limit of messages, known as “tweets”, on Twitter is 280. It is an informative and useful site to know what is happening around the globe. You can also see the trending topics & news on Twitter and frame your advertisement strategy according to it.
- Instagram – Nowadays, Instagram is one of the most popular social networking platforms among youngsters on which they can upload pictures, videos, reels, etc. It was launched in 2010 and now it has over 1 billion active users around the globe.
Instagram is the best place to boost your social media engagement rate as it accounts for a higher return on investment (ROI) and 200 million+ business accounts that people visit every day. Only you have to set up an Instagram business account, create your social media post with the help of Instagram brand guidance and you are ready to grow your audience. As 70% of users are looking for their next purchase on Instagram, you can directly sell on it. It provides advertising facilities like tracking account performance, using real-time data through real-time insights tools, sharing contact information, engaging with your community, etc.
Conclusion
Social media is one of the best platforms for digital marketing. It has a large user base, easy to use, convenient and free of cost. Only you have to plan and follow a better digital marketing strategy to stay ahead of your business competitors. For a powerful social media marketing strategy, boosting your engagement rate is vital as it strengthens your social presence. There are various social media platforms, some of them discussed above, that provide social media marketing services paid as well as free. You can use them to build your brand and maximize your potential.
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