Do you find it difficult to stay consistent on social media? Don’t worry, many people do.
Social media strategies require constant posting, engaging, and networking with other accounts. It seems straightforward, but it can be challenging to implement.
This article dives into the intricacies of setting up and implementing a social media engagement strategy. So if you want to get the most out of your social media to grow your business, read on.
Why social media engagement is important
Social media engagement is the practice of interacting with other accounts. This could take the form of sharing, liking, posting, commenting, or direct messaging.
Social media engagement is so important because it allows you to reach and impact more people. The more people that you impact, the more your business grows. In today’s social media-driven business climate, engagement means everything.
Generally speaking, social media algorithms reward posts that have more interactions. Gone are the days of posting and praying that your content will be seen in the feed.
In short, you have to strategically “engage” with the social media world to get engagement back.
Now that we know how important it is to engage on social media, let’s take a look at how to make it happen in practice. Social media engagement isn’t something you do once in a while. To be successful, you have to consistently work at it.
Tip 1: Develop a comprehensive social media strategy
The first step in engaging on social media like a boss is to come up with a solid strategy. A well-thought-out strategy takes all the uncertainty out of the mix. Instead of struggling to find the “perfect thing to post”, you need a process in place with tangible targets to hit on a regular basis.
A good strategy should include:
- KPIs
- Goals
- Timeline
- Action steps
- Schedule
- Platforms
- Audiences
Combining these attributes paints a picture and gives you something to aim at. Most people fall off a consistent posting schedule because they don’t outline the steps needed to achieve a result.
Instead of taking a step back and analyzing the situation, they just double down and “try harder.”
Don’t do this to yourself. Take the time to plan ahead and you will reduce the risk of missing posts, follow your posting schedule with more regularity, and maximize engagement from your posts.
Tip 2: Use social media management tools
Social media managers can easily get overwhelmed. When you have a monster posting schedule to keep up with, it’s almost impossible to keep up on your own.
This is where social media management tools come in.
Social media management tools allow you to create, organize, schedule, and distribute posts. Many tools leverage the power of AI to further expedite workflows. These tools are life savers when it comes to replicating post types and maximizing engagement.
Depending on what platform you’re using, some of the best social media tools out there include:
- Hootsuite
- Buffer
- Tweethunter
- Sprout Social
- Social Pilot
One of the best features of social media management tools is your ability to aggregate social data points in a central location – instead of logging in to 5 accounts, you only have to log in to one.
This means that you can fly through your comments and inboxes while responding to everyone. Simply put, your workflow will get 2-3X faster which will make your engagement more reliable.
To speed up your workflow even further, you can use AI art generators like DALL-E 2 to generate unique, one-of-a-kind images that will help your social media content stand out from the crowd and capture the attention of your audience with its creativity and originality.
Tip 3: Create a content calendar
A content calendar is a fancy way of describing your plan of what to post and when to post it. a good content calendar should include the following:
- Post text
- Post image
- day of the week
- Time of the day
- Platforms
To get the most out of your content calendar, you’ll want to batch post-production. Batching is when you do the same task repeatedly to increase efficiency.
My recommendation is to sit down and write all of your social media posts in the first couple of days for the entire month. This way, you can focus your concentration and efforts on engaging with users on your posts and in the DMs.
Tip 4: Engage with your audience
Once you have a social media following, it is important to interact with them and stay engaged. People go on social media to consume content and interact with others. When you interact with your followers, you’re drawing them towards your brand like a moth to a flame.
Here are the best ways to effectively engage with followers:
- comment on other people’s stuff
- repost other people’s stuff
- reply to other people’s comments
- send direct messages
When you’re engaging with your audience, keep these tips in mind:
- use “normal” language – reply how you speak
- Be authentic – don’t comment unless you truly believe what you’re saying
- Show interest in other people’s projects
- Include personal experience to entice people to check out your page
- Link to other resources when relevant
Set a goal to engage a set number of times using all of these methods. Engaging with other people is the fastest way to expand your reach and grow your own following.
Tip 5: Keep up with trends
Social media is all about what’s happening NOW. This makes it imperative to keep up to date and comment on the latest trends. After all, you don’t want your page to be behind the times!
The best way to keep up with trends is to follow other pages in your industry. If everyone else is posting about a current event, it might be a sign to also jump on the bandwagon and post about the same topic.
Ideally, you would want to anticipate the trend and get out in front of it. This can be done with some common sense, guesswork, and leveraging trend identification tools such as Glimpse, Exploding Topics, or Feedly.
Tip 6: Analyze and adjust your strategy
When you’re staying consistent with social media engagement, you have to track your stats to see how you’re doing. If you don’t track your stats, you might as well be throwing mud at the wall because you have no idea if it’s working!
Social media metrics can be gathered from each individual platform or aggregated into one dashboard using social media management tools. Using these analytics platforms, you want to track your total “engagements”.
An engagement is a measure of any time someone interacts with a post. This could be likes, comments, shares, or retweets.
To improve your engagement over time, track these metrics on a monthly basis and look for trends to see what kind of content is performing the best. A/B test different copy and creative to find winning combinations. Save your best-performing content so you can reuse the concept for future campaigns.
Over time, you will build up a stable of high-performing posts that you can keep using to maximize engagement consistently!
Tip 7: Collaborate with influencers
Collaborations are a great way to stay consistent with social media engagement. Influencers are people in your space that share the same kinds of content that you do. They could be celebrities, content creators, industry experts, or just enthusiasts.
When you work with influencers, you leverage their ability to produce consistent and relevant content—which increases engagement over time.
To find influencers to work with, you have to look in the right places and reach out. Here are a few places that you can start your search:
- social media
- hashtags
- YouTube
- Forums
- Membership Groups
- Outsourcing platforms
Once you find the right people to work with, you have to reach out and pitch them on a collaboration. This could mean that you produce content, share their content with your audience, or pay them for exposure.
When you’re negotiating your collaboration, it’s important to try and achieve a win-win situation. People are much more likely to work with you if you give value and want to see others succeed. Over time, you will have a network of influencers that help share your content and can help engage with end users.
Conclusion
Enhancing social media engagement is an ongoing process that requires strategic planning, active audience interaction, trend awareness, performance analysis, and collaboration.
By implementing the tips discussed—from batching content production, engaging authentically with your audience, staying atop current trends, to networking with influencers—you lay the foundation for a robust social media presence.
Remember, the digital world thrives on community and connection. If you want to be successful on social media, put these strategies into practice, monitor the results, and continuously refine your approach.
