A Check List of 15 Social Media Tips to Kindle Audience Engagement

If there’s one metric that represents a definite and direct result of social media marketing, it is social media engagement.

What Is Social Media Engagement? Why Is It Important For Your Business?

Engagement is the sum of likes, shares and comments that your message has received on social media. It is a fair assessment of the impact that your message has created on your social media audience.

For your business to succeed on social media, you have to attract and hold your target audience members on your social media pages, and engaging them is the first stop on the road to building a loyal social media following.

Here are 15 super-effective ways of engaging your social media audience.

1. Aid In Discovery

The quality of content you create does not matter unless your audience can find you. Optimize all description boxes on your social media business pages and profiles.

Mike Kawula has ‘CEO’ in his Twitter bio because he wants to rank for CEO on Twitter searches.

Aptly describe the content you create each time you publish a social media post.

As Josue Valles says, it doesn’t matter how beautiful your page looks if your Tweets appear to be like an ‘afterthought’.

Put effort into crafting the actual text for your social media post descriptions. The more specific you are the better.

2. Post Consistently

Frequency matters. A conversation happens in minutes, not months. To initiate conversations with your audience you have to post more frequently.

If you can’t consistently produce quality content, source it with a reliable content curation app.

Consistency is vital because via social media you’re building a rapport with your audience, and being in constant contact with them matters.

3. Promote Extensively

Don’t hold back on promoting yourself. If you don’t toot your horn, no one else will do it for you.

Did you know that most viral content is a product of excellent content and tireless marketing? Please not: This is in reference to advertorial content that goes viral and not cat and dog videos.

To market your content to the best effect you must first identify the channels your audience members frequent. Don’t limit yourself to a medium. By sharing your content on multiple media you could attract your audience to your social media pages so you have a larger audience to market to.

For instance, the blog posts you write could go up both on social media And in an email newsletter (email marketing) with social media plug ins.

4. Time It Right

Be aware of average social feed rates on each platform you are present on. On a general note, Twitter runs in seconds, Facebook in hours and LinkedIn by the day. The quicker a feed moves, the more you should post to it.

Identify which time intervals during the day and on which days your posts receive the most activity, and accordingly post your content once, or multiple times.

One time doesn’t fit all. Neither does one frequency. Post three times on a Sunday on LinkedIn and you will infuriate more people than you’ll attract.

5. Offer Real Value

Not sure what content to post on social media? Here’s a simple solution: post content that helps your readers.

Offer your audience actionable content that can impact their lives. Help them overcome a hurdle and climb to the next level.

It doesn’t matter what you’re offering: an Ebook, a set of visuals or a guide, it will work as long as it helps people.

For exceptional results you need to know your audience well, and what they require at the momement.

6. Communicate Clearly

Fancy comes second. Wit and humor are extremely tough to get right, and require experience and an understanding of your audience members’ minds to pull off successfully.

Consider this: different people belonging to different demographics are influenced by different cultural attributes.

If you’re a global brand, you’ll have to create content that appeals to them all, which is hard, unless you have the budget to create content for each culture or audience type.

Instead, you could simply work with the classics: a unique value proposition, smart and clean writing and a compelling call to action.

7. Inspire Your Audience

Most people require motivation to move, behave as you want them to. Unless your audience has reason to do something, they probably won’t.

So give them reason to. Inspire them to use your product. Have you noticed how motivational quotes work wonders on social media?

Every person is working towards some goal in her/his life and is by default on the hunt for inspiration.

8. Move Your Audience

One of the ways to connect with your audience is through a social cause. It could be a campaign to raise awareness, drive a change in behavior or encourage participation in some activity for a cause.

For cause based campaigns, you have to move your audience.

You could refer to successful campaigns for inspiration, but ensure that while your intention may to drive traffic to your social media pages or website, you deliver what you promise to the cause.

9. Be What They Need

Social media marketing is successful when it is audience-oriented rather than brand-oriented.

To be sure that you’re writing is useful to your readers, you could surf sites like Quora or use FAQs from your website as reference for your writing.

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Interaction isn’t instant. After creating your social media pages, it takes consistent posting and effort from your side to get your audience talking.

To develop interaction you could:

a. Ask a question (polls)

b. Initiate a discussion
c. Create a contest
d. Tag people relevant to a post

When you audience does begin to interact, be sure to respond to comments quickly and comprehensively.

11. Use Intrigue

Ever seen a post that you couldn’t resist clicking on? That’s precisely what you want to recreate for your audience.

I like to maintain a document of compelling titles that I come across for inspiration.

The recipe for intriguing titles in simple: say enough to create interest + say no more.

12. Chat. Twitter Chat.

Chats work exceptionally well in creating engagement. On Twitter you could simultaneously chat with the complete span of your audience. It is the simplest way of assembling your high potential target audience in one place, and in the same conversation.

Regularly participating in Twitter chats or hosting them could in the long run impact your conversion numbers.

13. Find Your Tribes

The internet functions much like the real world on a broad social level. People with common interests find ways to convene and discuss things important to them.

On social media there are groups, pages and discussions, and your goal should be ti find the ones that concern your industry or product.

Once you have, it is important to become an active and generous member of that group. Eventually you will discover that conversations come up where your fellow group members need assistance or recommendations for a product. That’s where you pipe in.

14. Stay Current And Updated

Newsy content has its own charm. People around the world like to be informed of the latest happenings, in a general sense and there are far too many sources of news out there.

That is great for brands and companies because they could become curators for news that matters on social media. You don’t have to source the content yourself, you could employ a news aggregation app to do it for you.

15. Ask Your Followers To Engage

Asking people to engage increases engagement levels. So in addition to having your Call To Action on social media posts, you could put in a request for your audience to engage with you.

Overall, your tone should be conversational, polite and encouraging to evoke responses from your audience. The key is timing, targeting and consistency. Focus on getting these three elements right and you should be able to effectively increase your social media engagement.

^{* Adapted lead image: Public Domain, pixabay.com via getstencil.com}