How to Grow an Engaged Social Media Community to Increase Your Brand Awareness
Would you like to build and grow social media engagement and a community of people who WANT to interact with you, WANT to know more about your business, and WANT to buy from you?
Of course, …who doesn’t?!
However, many small business owners find themselves feeling stuck, spinning their wheels on social media and just not getting the engagement they are looking for.
So in this post, we’re going to talk about social media engagement!
What is Social Media Engagement?
The general definition of social media engagement is: when people interact with you and/or your content on different social media platforms.
Positive engagement is one of the most effective ways of building trust and credibility between a brand and its customers, which over time can lead to brand loyalty and even championing. It also provides a measurement as to how effectively a company is creating interactions with its customers in the social stream. It can be measured in many ways such as likes, mentions, shares, views, comments, subscriptions, etc. – and correlates with the number of people who are forming a relationship with the brand.
So, if someone acknowledges your content on social media and takes any kind of action, this means social media engagement!
Ultimately, the more engagement we can get, the better!
Why is Social Media Engagement Important?
There are some solid business reasons why social media engagement is so important.
1. It Boosts The Visibility of Posts
When people interact with your posts on social media, this signals that your post is interesting, valuable and is worth reading/seeing.
For instance, you may have noticed that when you post something on your Facebook business page and you don’t start getting likes, comments or shares, your post reach, and engagement often fizzle out before it even started.
On the other hand, as people start interacting with your post, Facebook’s algorithms “notice” your post is popular and gives it even more visibility, showing it in more feeds.
This seems to be the case across all social media platforms. The more engagement you get on your post, tweet, or pin, the more visibility the algorithms will give it in people’s feeds!
2. It Boosts Your Credibility
Engagement on your social media posts signals to fans, followers and other users that you’re a person with credibility.
It indicates that your posts are interesting, entertaining or educational and that you’re worth following or interacting with.
If people see others engaging with you on social media, they are far more likely to trust you, follow you, and ultimately, to buy from you.
How to Increase Social Media Engagement: 6 Strategies You Can Start Using Today
1. Respond and Interact
Social media has become the customer service centre for most businesses, large and small. Customers and patrons use the different sites as a way to find and gather information, ask generic questions and to compliment or complain about your business.
Twitter and Facebook have become the first places people go to for customer support, product enquiries or just to say thank you to businesses.
However, engagement is a two-way street. If all you do is post content and then move on to your next task, you’ve missed the point of social media entirely.
While it’s true that a good percentage of your social media engagement will come from simply posting amazing content, it’s also important to follow up by responding to comments and interacting with your followers.
2. Use Facebook Groups to Truly Build Community
It has become increasingly difficult to get your Facebook page posts seen by your fans. This can obviously lead to far less engagement, leads, and sales.
One way around this – and a great strategy in its own right – is to create your own Facebook group where you can interact with your prospects, customers, and clients.
Groups have a much more personal feel than pages and allow you to truly build a community: a place where your members can interact with you and with one another.
It’s also much easier to get your posts seen within groups, especially if your content is geared toward the specific problems and questions your group members are asking.
3. Use a Call To Action (CTA) in Your Posts
A call to action is a way for you to entice your social media audience to focus their attention on the next action you want them to take.
Some other examples of calls to action you can use include:
- Click the link
- Download now
- Like this post
- Comment below
- Buy now
- Follow us
- Hit the subscribe button
- Share this post
On Facebook, you can add:
- Sign Up
- Shop Now
- Contact Us
- Watch Video
- Apply Now
- And more!
These buttons link directly to the link in your post, and you can even link phone numbers in for mobile posts.
4. Get Your Community Involved in Your Content
Without community engagement, you can’t continue running a good community and you won’t have any interaction. Communities exist but to identify them, give them a place and involve them, just sharing content is often not enough.
Using a compelling call to action is one way to get your audience engaging with your content – to have them actually do something, rather than just read your post or browse your website.
However, the type of content you post also has a big impact on how much engagement you get.
Some examples of content that will inspire your audience to take action include:
- Asking questions
- Sharing user-generated content (e.g., posts, pictures or videos of your followers using your products)
- Asking for feedback
- Holding Q&A sessions
- Doing Facebook Lives or Instagram Lives
- Hosting live events on social media
- Doing polls or surveys
- Holding contests or giveaways
All of these strategies get your followers directly involved with your content, drawing them in and getting them to interact.
If you always come from the mindset of making someone else’s day better, you will get great emotional responses from your audience. No matter if your posts are entertaining in nature or serious in scope, if they are relevant and precise, you will always get a great response. Community engagement is understanding what members want and acting upon it.
5. Regularly Post Engaging Content
Having a consistent posting schedule – even if that means only posting a couple of times a week – is far better than posting a ton one week and nothing the next.
6. Use visuals
Since people remember images more than text, they will be more likely to retain information if it’s in the form of a picture or graph.
Produce videos. The possibilities with video content are nearly endless, you can produce videos like:
- “how-to” tutorials
- product demonstrations
- entertainment
- discussions
- interviews
Add videos to your website, posts, email newsletters, and social media channels.
Now Go…Start Engaging!
The social media engagement strategies above aren’t exactly rocket science; however, you’d be amazed at how many small business owners forget to use them…and suffer the consequences! Especially during this difficult time.
Alternatively, you can get in touch with us for social media management help.