SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT IS IMPORTANT FOR YOUR PERSONAL BRAND

Social media is popular for entertainment, networking connections, sharing photos and videos, and interactions with like-minded individuals. Engagement and communication is not a one-way street though; people are also interested in building and maintaining relationships on social media. In the social media world, engagement is a measurement and illustration of how people are interacting with your content.

Some important types of engagement include likes, comments, saves, clicks, shares, retweets, and mentions; essentially, it’s all a numbers game. Yes, having thousands of followers is exciting and helps your brand stand out, but that high follower count means nothing if no one is conversing with each other and with your brand. Successful, meaningful engagement provides people with a sense of well-being – people feel acknowledged, feel important, and ultimately feel cared for.

Engagement Builds a Loyal Following

Good engagement with your audience is an indication of good customer service and support. One of the many perks of social media is the immediacy of contact and responses. Actively and successfully answering questions and concerns of your audience through social media can promote consumer advocacy. Word spreads quickly on social media, for good and bad experiences alike. If people see great customer engagement from your brand, they’ll likey share their positive experiences with others.

Active engagement also helps build and hone relationships with your customers. You can learn from your audience and watch in real-time what resonates with them. Engagement can help you build a better community for your followers and maintain a loyal audience over the long term.

To ensure long-term successful engagement metrics, it’s important to take the time and energy to monitor and adjust your engagement goals. Platforms grow and recede, people move around platforms, and social media sites constantly tweak their algorithms. Engagement upkeep plays a vital role in the development of communities within certain platforms such as Facebook.

Facebook offers many channels for users to engage with your brands. Facebook groups, for instance, are a great place to start building a community around your brand, specifically because Facebook’s algorithm prioritizes content from groups. Visitors can interact with your page through actionable clicks and interact with your posts through comments, likes, and shares.

Thinking Outside the Box to Increase Engagement

Engagement can also occur through interactions with other pages when users share or mention your page in other spaces. Consumers use Facebook Groups to directly engage with your brand. It offers a unique opportunity to engage with your users on a more relatable level.

Depending on the platform of choice, hashtags are another strategy that can really help you improve your social media engagement. Hashtags make your brand discoverable and increase your social shares. Specifically, Instagram and Twitter are two platforms where hashtags can be incredibly successful in growing your followers and meeting your engagement goals. Instagram, in particular, benefits from hashtag strategies because hashtags fuel the discovery portion.

Instagram hashtag engagement is all about numbers and balance. Just because the platform allows 30 hashtags doesn’t mean your content needs that many listed. Consider writing targeted hashtags that are more specific to your brand and target audience. Targeted hashtags also help your brand get discovered by new audiences. New audiences means new follows, which means new engagement, which means more customers!

Another hashtag strategy that can be utilized across a variety of platforms is the use of branded hashtags. This hashtag creatively features your brand name and is perfect to use on any post, regardless of format or content. Other hashtags are more temporary, like event or campaign hashtags. While these are unique to a specific event at a particular time, they can still tie directly to your brand and still succeed in building conversations around your business. Hashtags invite your user to engage and share your content.

How to See if Your Engagement Strategy is Working

Regardless of the methods you chose for your social media engagement, remember to utilize analytical tools to help steer your engagement strategies. Determine what metrics are important to your brand and match these metrics to your goals to learn how and where you can improve your process.

Analytics will help you determine what type of content your audience prefers to interact with – do they prefer images? Videos? Or would they choose polls over Q&As? As we mentioned in our previous blog, our team uses Sendible, which features some great visuals to help you decipher the type of content users might want to interact with and how to improve your social media engagement.

Another way to improve your social media engagement is by implementing strategies in collaboration with platform-specific algorithms. Easier said than done, of course, anyone with experience in social media management understands the enriching yet challenging relationship with algorithms. Understanding how algorithms work on each platform will help you determine when and how to best engage with your audience.

Take timing for instance, one of the most difficult metrics to master. Timing your engagement is important because if you post when your viewers are offline, your fantastic stories and curated messages will go unnoticed. Your goal should be to post and engage when your audience is most active to boost your engagement and broaden your reach.

This might take some trial and error, so refer to your analytics to find that golden time. Once you nail the timing, the focus becomes what and how will you post? Once again, platform-dependent algorithms will help you find these answers. Platforms promote content based on likes, comments, shares, and other criteria. For instance, hashtags may work well on Twitter, but Instagram might favor stories over actual posts.

Even with the knowledge of how social engagement can be beneficial to your brand and how to stay on track for successful engagement, it can be difficult to develop content, monitor analytics, and answer all inquiries in comments and direct messages. Bell + Ivy can alleviate some of those pressures with their online services for individuals and small businesses. Whether it’s the creation of custom blog content or writing personal brand bios, with Bell + Ivy’s Personal Brand Starter Package, you can start developing personalized marketing and branding projects to expand the reach and appeal of your brand.

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