Engagements are what powers your reach and retention on social media. Garnering as many likes, shares, comments or retweets early on will have a massive impact as to how well both individual posts and your pages as a whole perform. 

Whilst timing and content are driving factors, there are many other variables which can come into play when you’re looking to really generate some interest around your business on these platforms. In this week’s blog we’re going to take a look at some of the best ways that you can improve on the engagement rates your business generates on a daily basis.

Post to a Consistent Schedule

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? The problem being that with business owners having 1001 things needing to be done each day, posting on social media can often find itself either at the bottom of the list or neglected entirely. 

However, all of the social media networks have algorithms that work based on consistency. If your posts are always posted at a certain time on certain days then as soon as you differ from this the algorithm has to start trying to learn your audience all over again.

Posting to a consistent schedule is one of the easiest ways that you can garner better engagement rates. Be sure to put thought into your schedule though, take a look at this HootSuite article as a good place to begin planning. 

Also consider your industry carefully when developing a posting schedule. For example; if your business is based in the food industry then you’re going to want to target mealtimes as a prime time for publishing content across your social media channels.

Tailor Content To Your Audience

This should be seen in two parts, planning and reaction. Every business should put serious thought into the content that they produce for social media if they want it to be impactful with their target audience. Simply bouncing ideas around the workplace an hour before you’re due to post isn’t going to lead to great results when it comes to engagements.

Just as you will be carrying out market research and competitor analysis of your business as a whole, the same should be done in regard to social media. What are other businesses in your industry doing and is it working? What kind of content do your audience usually engage with? These are two key questions that should be addressed in developing tailored content for your social media.

The second part is to be reactive to what has been received well previously by your audience. If you’re already monitoring engagement rates then you’ll be able to know which posts have performed better previously.

Look to the type of content, the aim of these posts and the kind of content used (image, video, poll etc.) then see how this can be replicated without being repetitive. The last part here is key, as just because one certain post has done well doesn’t mean you should repeat this every time, as your audience will soon become bored and those engagements will fall once again. 

Be Sure To Use The Highest Quality Imagery

People use their social media accounts to consume content that they find attractive to their interests. It means that grabbing a user’s attention as they scroll through their feed is vital in the quest to ensure they engage with the content your page is publishing. 

However you use image based content it is vital that these are of the highest possible quality. From using the best edited live images to crafting the most aesthetically pleasing infographics to use in posts having more attractive content than that of your competitors is certain to ensure they choose to engage with your business and not others. 

Perhaps there’s an office photoshop wizkid who can take responsibility for helping create this content, Or for smaller operations you can look to use free stock image sites such as Pexels, or content editing softwares like Canva to get the best quality content produced in-house.

If you feel you’ve just not got the time or prefer to focus on other areas of the business, then contacting a local social media agency who can take over the legwork for you is probably the best way forward.

Experiment With Other Features Of Certain Platforms

It’s not just posting on social media that businesses can be doing to increase their reach and engagements through these channels any more. In recent years; Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn have introduced new exciting features such as stories and live streaming to their platforms as a way to keep users on the apps for a s long a s possible.

This has therefore created opportunities for businesses to also produce content for these areas of social media. Running quick animated videos on a story or livestreaming updates from the organisation and its people are great ways to be seen as different in your industry.

One such example that many businesses find successful is to run competitions/giveaways using the story feature on Facebook and Instagram. Having other users tag the business in their own stories helps spread brand awareness far quicker than simply having people share a post as their friends, connections or followers will be much more engaged when watching their story than they are when a post pops up in their feed.

Honourable Mentions

There are many other tactics which can be explored when it comes to improving your social media engagement rates, though if we covered them all in depth, this article would resemble a well known novel written by Fyodor Dostoevsky. Below is a list including some honourable mentions for boosting your engagements:

• Ask #questions in your posts to encourage discussion
• Try and relate to problems your audience face, suggesting how they can be solved
• Always reply to comments, retweets and shares of your posts
• Participate in relevant groups and communities to your industry
• Try and use humour in a tasteful sense to show that the business isn’t all about sales and information.