Social Media Engagement: What Is It and How Do I Improve It?

Do you ever feel like your social media is a one-sided conversation? Do you feel as if no one is ever responding to your posts on social media? This might be because your social media platforms have low engagement.

What is Engagement?
In the most simplistic terms, engagement is when you get your audience to respond to your posts on any form of social media. This information can be tracked by how much people engage with you and how often people engage with you. The most common examples include likes, retweets, comments, favorites, mentions, and shares.

What is an engagement rate?
An engagement rate is a metric that social media marketers use to measure the level of engagement that a piece of content is receiving. This is an important metric for marketers to use because it will help them evaluate how they are doing with their social media efforts. An engagement rate is calculated by using the following formula: Engagement Rate = Engagements x 100 / Impressions. The great thing is that a lot of social media platforms will already have an engagement rate calculated for you in their analytics section, so it’s very easy for companies to monitor their engagement rate.

What is considered a good engagement rate?
Engagement rates can vary from industry to industry and from platform to platform. A company’s engagement rate can even change depending on how many followers or likes a company may have. Listed below are to be considered “good” engagement rates on a few different social media platforms:

• Twitter: 0.02% – 0.09%
• Instagram: 1.64% – 3.48%
• Facebook: 0.5% – 0.99%

Why is engagement important?
Engagement is important because it is a way that you can create meaningful relationships with your audience. Engagement is that long-term relationship that you want to establish so that you have a loyal and engaged audience for years to come.

How do I improve my engagement?
Improving engagement isn’t hard, but it does take time and effort in order to be successful. Listed below are a few ways that you can increase engagement:

1. Start the conversation: This means that you need to post content that is valuable to your customers. It is important for you to understand what types of content and posts get attention, and what types don’t.
2. Target the right demographic: This goes hand-in-hand with the first tip. How are you supposed to pick the right type of content if you don’t know who your target audience is? Pay attention to your audience in terms of gender, age, and location. You can always tweak your content to get the best strategy possible for your audience.
3. Be visual: Social media users love visual content. Research has discovered that images can result in a higher engagement rate on all forms of social media. In order to be successful with this, use high-quality, eye-catching images that your audience will want to click on and look at.
4. Utilize free social media monitoring tools: Monitoring content that your audience is posting is hard to do, especially with thousands of potential notifications. Invest and utilize free social media monitoring tools so that you can monitor and listen to your social media activity. My top choices for monitoring social media platforms include HootSuite, Buffer, and Google Alerts.
5. Add some personality: Adding personality to your social media platforms is not only fun but important. Customers want to feel as if they are talking to another person when interacting on social media, not a robot. If done correctly, adding a personality or unique voice will make your customers more likely to interact with your company on social media in the future.

Do I need engagement?
Yes! It is one of the most effective and popular methods of strengthening interaction between your company and your customer. Increasing your company’s social media engagement can help turn your one-sided conversation, into a two-way conversation that is beneficial for both you and your audience.

Let’s keep the conversation going by commenting below or tweeting @WTWH_Anna.