Success on social media doesn’t just mean increasing your followers. Posting and ghosting your audience doesn’t get you what you really want – engagement.  True engagement requires a proactive approach. Managing engagement and communications with your followers helps turn users and followers into advocates for your brand and possibly – customers.

Defining social media engagement

Social media engagement is a measure of how audiences are interacting with your social media content. Usually, this is shown as a percentage of total views. This returns as an ‘engagement rate’. Some of the metrics that social media managers use are:

• Likes
• Comments
• Followers
• Shares
• Retweets
• Click-throughs
• Direct messages
• Favorites

Having a large following does you no good if they aren’t paying attention. If you have lots of followers, but they aren’t engaging in other ways – it’s time to change your content strategy. Vanity metrics look great, but what you really want is what helps your business.

Increasing Social Media Engagement

Now that you know what engagement is – let’s talk about how to increase engagement across your social media channels.

Understand your platforms

It’s critical to understand the purpose of each channel, who is likely to be on that channel and how they best consume their content. “Create once, post everywhere” used to be the norm, but audiences aren’t falling for that anymore.

Engagement Tips Across Platforms

• Know your audience – Know who consumes your content, where they are and what’s important to them. Review the content you post and see which ones get the most engagement – do more of that. Advanced Instagram Analytics can help you get the insights you need to improve your content plan.
• Jump on trending conversations – Comment on trending events, like award shows or other news topics. A word of caution – talk to team members and get some additional feedback on anything that might be controversial before getting yourself into a PR mess.
• Practice active audience interaction – Like or respond to comments. The key is to be on-brand and authentic. Generic comments like “that’s great!” won’t work as well over time. The algorithm will know you’re just phoning it in.

Instagram engagement tips

• According to a 2021 study by Social Insider and Sked Social, carousel posts consistently have the highest engagement rate on Instagram. Use carousels to promote products, tell a story or share testimonials with your audience
• Use Instagram’s recent shift to a focus on video content via Reels to boost your engagement. The algorithm has been encouraging the use of video content on Reels and rewarding users who post this type of content. Make use of these high engagement rates by making Reels videos with trending audios and formats which you can find on the Reels tab.
• Add Instagram stories to ask questions, polls and use link stickers to drive engagement

TikTok engagement tips

• TikTok’s engagement algorithm rewards users for using trending sounds. For better or worse, jumping on trends boosts your reach
• Use series to gain followers who want to see the next part in the series. Keep these uniform – same background and format

Facebook engagement tips

• Facebook skews ‘older’ – as in, millennials and above, mostly. Change your messaging, imagery and content to address these users
• Use Facebook Live. Make it a regular ‘show’ that users can look forward to. On average Live videos bring in more than double the number of comments per video than standard Facebook video posts.
• Facebook groups are still a great place to garner engagement and also to begin to monetize an audience. Setting up a brand Facebook Group can be a great way to boost engagement and drive people to your other social media platforms and website.

Twitter engagement tips

• Use pop culture and memes to jump on the latest conversations. Twitter’s 330 million user-per-month reach can dramatically increase your brand awareness
• Use GIFs. A study of 3.7 million Tweets showed that GIFs received 55% more engagement rates than those without.

LinkedIn engagement tips

• Keep your business profile up to date and on-brand.
• Feature employees and customer testimonials. Using real people creates a human element.
• Make use of the poll feature. Polling and the results from your poll offer a chance for engagement during the poll and after.

Now what?

Now that you’re a social media engagement insider, you can start using these tips right away. Create your content in batches, then schedule your posts with Sked Social. You’ll never miss a post or a chance to engage with your audience. Sked even gives you performance metrics and analytics to benchmark and track your goals. Try Sked Social free for 7 days and up-level your social media engagement game.