Social Media Engagement Tactics You Should Try

Marketing specialists admit that a brand-oriented promotion strategy that doesn’t include social media marketing can’t be called complete. However, the rapid development of technologies, quickly changing trends, and innovations demand adjustment and the search for new ways of engaging users. We looked at recent trends and compiled a few tips for everyone who wants to develop their marketing strategy in the social media sphere in 2019.

1. 1. Learn from your content
   2. Ask questions
   3. Create contests and giveaways
   4. Start creating video content

1. Make the most of stories

1. Learn From Your Content

You probably have already posted something on your brand’s social media accounts. Look at your posts objectively and ask yourself the following questions:

• Are my promotion campaigns on social media effective?
• What are my best-performing posts?
• What are the similarities between them?
• What did my audience like about them?
• How can I create more valuable and shared posts?
• What are my competitors’ strategies? What do my competitors position?
• How can I use the experience of successful accounts for my posts?

While many companies tend to create more and more similar publications, social media marketers with great experience advise you to experiment and track the statistics of each post to develop the “formula” of successful content.

Suppose you’ve found what type of posts work best for your company. However, this means nothing unless your target audience sees the post. Unfortunately, there’s no ‘best time to publish’ that can fit all companies; it’s essential to know when your followers are active and post your content in the right time frame. If you want to save time and nerves, schedule with PromoRepublic: its algorithm analyzes the data and offers the best time for posting according to your needs. Hence, the user has to approve the suggestion and be sure your content is published on time. After all, the more followers are active online when your post goes live, the higher social media engagement it can get.

Source: RawStory

Measure your success

But how can you tell if your content is successful? Let’s take a look at the primary data you should pay attention to while analyzing your social media content:

• ROI (return on investment) is the most common ratio for measuring the profitability of your marketing campaigns.

ROI = benefit (return)/costs (expenses).

• Shares and likes — the easiest way to understand if you’re doing everything right are to look at your posts’ likes and shares. You can track them in your account statistics and compare statistics for every week, month, and year.
• Followers are one more obvious metric that shows the number of people who have followed you in a certain period. You can also see the demographic scale of your audience, their location, the days of the week, and the time when they are the most active.
• Organic/paid results — you can see how many people you get in this period from paid campaigns (pay-per-click) and how many people came from your organic search.

The more attention you pay to more popular posts shared than the others, the wiser you are in targeting the kind of content your audience desires. Pay attention to the content your competitors publish and how you can develop your content strategy around their experiences.

2. Ask Questions

Communication with your followers is an essential part of any marketing strategy. But in social media, marketing has a much more crucial role than anywhere else, as platforms imply direct communication.

Source: SproutSocial

So, many big companies try to bring communication with prospective customers to the next level by engaging them with open dialogue. One of the ways to do that is by provoking a frank discussion or any other form of conversation.

For example, you could ask people:

• To share a personal opinion
• To take participation in a survey
• To share personal experience
• To vote for one of the provided options
• To rate a product or service
• To leave a review
• To share content

Many companies and bloggers successfully use each of these practices. Not only do they help to communicate with individuals, but they also help to gather data and opinions while improving support service and establishing trust.

For example, if you were to ask your customers to send you photos of the food they have eaten in your restaurant, you might receive the following:

• An engaging boost
• A product review
• A personal opinion
• A boost in shares
• Trustworthy content for people who have yet to visit your restaurant
• Fresh content, ready for you to post on your page

A quick tip:

Sinthia Pirstein, Social Media Marketer of EssayTigers, shares a quick tip:

“It’s not only important WHAT you post but also WHEN and HOW OFTEN. Different social platforms can provide information about when your users are the most active. By experimenting with a posting frequency, you can find your own “sweet spot” — the number of posts per day or week.”

It’s an easy and quick tip, but it helps to understand how you might provide more valuable content for your users.

3. Create Contests and Giveaways

Engagement is often tightly connected with incentives. Offering to give something back shows that you not only view your customers as customers but as people whose opinions you value. This is a tactic that a lot of marketers count use to generate leads effectively.

Source: Bitly

Interest in your content might not be enough to improve engagement. Many people follow their favorite brands on social media but never leave comments or share their posts. To engage more followers, companies hold giveaways and contests. Users who take participation in these events can get the following:

• Discounts
• Coupons
• Certificates
• Free samples
• Catalogs
• Products
• Services
• Meetings with favorite influencers
• Tickets or invitations to certain events

When you start a new campaign, setting up your goals and expectations is helpful, which can later be compared to the received results. You should also calculate the ROI of each movement to understand if the campaign was successful and brought you a significant outcome — a boost of ranking, conversion, or sales.

4. Start Creating Video Content

The rhythm of our lives in the modern world goes faster every year. People consume more information and use innovative tools that imply the trends are changing. Today, magazines and newspapers have been replaced by cell phones and tablets, and users need your information to be laconic and easy to perceive.

Videos invade different platforms. As time passes, more venues have adapted to allow video posting, live-streaming, and video-calling. For example, Instagram, as an image-posting platform, is slowly moving towards almost nothing but video content.

Source: Blue Corona

Trends dictate their rules, and one needs to adjust to an alternating world. Don’t be left behind — start working on video content which includes:

• “Behind the scenes” of your brand
• Live streams and conversations with your followers
• “How-to” educational videos
• Product reviews and unboxing
• “How it is made” videos
• Announcements and contest results
• New product presentations
• Product ads, along with job ads

Make videos short and mind whatever platform you create these videos for. For example, you can post a short 0.5 1-minute video on Instagram and include a link to a full-length video on YouTube. This way, you can create content for different channels and embrace different categories of social media users.

A quick tip: Consider adding subtitles, as many videos are watched on mute mode.

5. Make the Most of Stories

Stories are one of the most increasingly developing features of many social media platforms. They are short, informative, and easy to keep up with. It’s not surprising that many companies love this feature and use it for brand promotion.

You can use stories for any marketing purpose, such as:

• New product launches or announcements
• Ads
• News
• Content generated by your followers
• Your clients’ testimonials or images of products they bought from you

Use your imagination and creativity to let your followers know how your brand can help them solve their problems.

Nowadays, it’s hard to call social media solely communication platforms. Most businesses today use platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc., for business purposes and brand promotion. With three billion users worldwide, social media is an effective communication channel that can influence any market.