Five tips to increase engagement online

If there is one word that encapsulates modern marketing, it’s ‘engagement’. This is essentially like a long-term relationship and is the extent to which people are involved with your content and develop a loyalty to your brand.

So how can we engage with people online in meaningful and interesting ways? Engagement involves ongoing communication over a lengthy period. This is achieved through authentic interactions and discussions and reaching out to people when they have specific questions or feedback. All it takes is a bit of timely communication.

On social media, engagement is measured with clicks, impressions, profile views, likes and shares. Monitoring this will help to gain insight into the type of topics that your audience interact with. The more your audience engages with your social content, the more likely they are to trust your brand.

So how can you engage effectively with your online audience? Here are our top five tips:

1. Educate and inform 

While we all know social media is a powerful marketing tool, being too pushy with your brand is a real turn off. Communicating interesting, informative content that solves real problems will encourage users to follow you, share your posts, and trust your brand.

2. Use visual content

According to the Visual Networking Index by Cisco, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic by 2022. Businesses are realising its potential with 81% using video as a marketing tool, according to research by Wyzowl. Incorporating images and videos in your posts, which align with your brand’s social media persona, is a great way to increase social media engagement.

3. Join social media groups

Social media groups are great places to ‘meet’ potential customers, engage with those you already have, and promote your brand ­– if done correctly.

Make sure you do your research and identify the groups that are relevant to your market and audience. And don’t be in a rush to post too soon – take time to get to know the tone of voice used and the comments made.

4. Create social media polls

People love sharing their opinions in social media polls, which makes them an effective marketing tool. As well as encouraging your followers to engage with your posts, polls are more likely to be shared, which is another savvy way to increase engagement.

5. Use hashtags

Used correctly, hashtags are a vital marketing tool for expanding your reach. Research has shown that Twitter posts with hashtags get twice as much engagement. The more specific you are with your hashtags, the more targeted your followers will be – and targeted followers mean better engagement.

You can read more about getting hashtags right here.

While increasing engagement can be a challenge, adopting some of these best practices will help your business thrive and survive in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Want to find out more? Get in touch to find out how we can help boost your engagement strategies and help manage your social media networks

Image by LEEROY Agency from Pixabay