Yes its Working: 5 Steps to Drive Engagement on Your Social Content

The news feeds of social networks are now arranged in such a way that they give preference to accounts and groups with a high level of engagement.

The more you are liked, commented, and reposted, the more people see your posts in their feeds and recommendations.

So, what are the nuances that will help you increase your social audience engagement?

1. Regularly post quality content

Be sure to post regularly, don’t leave a day without publications. The principle of posts ranking is not clear to everyone. The algorithm is designed to make the news feed more interesting, useful, and of higher quality. What to do?

Forget about illegal methods of cheating, mass following, and mass liking: they will not help.
Remember the golden rule: quality and engaging content is shown first of all.
Use advertising, actively implement new features, block all inactive subscribers.

What posts win in the news feed?

Posts of people you correspond with, are familiar in real life or are Facebook friends.
Posts of people whose content you view, like, save, and comment.
Posts of people you’ve searched for in a general social network search.
Posts of real users (they are a priority to display compared to commercial pages and business profiles).
Posts that are promoted through targeted advertising.

Stories allow you to quickly engage the audience and are published above the news feed. So your social account automatically becomes more visible.

At the same time, the algorithm takes into account how you handle your content and how much time you spend on it.

Stories of your brand will be displayed more often to those who have already watched at least a few of them, visited your profile, wrote to you directly, or reacted to your content in the feed.

A few tips for stories:

Guest stories. Let somebody else create a story for you. It can be either a member of your team or a client. Or a famous person with an audience. It’s a great way to increase your reach and involvement of the audience. Coca-Cola launched a logo-placement platform with its “Share a Coke” campaign. Users all over the world photographed and posted pictures of themselves with their personalized bottles. It created 998 million impressions.

User-generated content. Use the feature that makes life easier for all business accounts, allowing you to use content generated by users. When a user with a public account pushes your brand to his or her stories, you can add his or her story to your social account. Hootsuite created a UGC campaign using the hashtag #IWorkFromHere. Users submitted creative photos that showed the unique places they do their social media work, all thanks to Hootsuite.

Use new features. For example, add new GIF animations to your stories, use the post saving tab, conduct surveys, and use hashtags. The fresher the type of content you use, the more attention you attract with your posts, both for subscribers and for smart feeds. The algorithm will notice all the types of posts that it considers relevant. This will bring you the desired upward movement in the news feed.

2. Be smart with hashtags

Hashtags help you get discovered, but this is only if you follow a few simple rules.

What kind of rules are these? Let’s talk about them now.

Choose the right hashtag language. If you mention a word in English, then your publication automatically gets to the user from all over the world.
Use original hashtags where possible. The maximum number of hashtags is 30 in one publication. It is important to use original hashtags with reference to your product or company. Do not create hashtag porridge.
Try not to use spam hashtags or links that are too popular. Such posts are at risk of getting banned or marked as spam.
Don’t write hashtags in the post itself, do it in the first comment. It spoils the aesthetics of your profile and distracts the reader.

3. Use Geolocation

The Head of Marketing at Ivory Research claims: “People are constantly looking for companies, places, and trends on Instagram. Almost a quarter of influencers believe that Instagram is the best network for influencer marketing. This is due to the visual character of the platform, as well as its ease of use. The platform simplifies the interaction and gives access to new content.”

Geolocation is one of the best sources of traffic and can be used by other members to access your profile. You need to use it wisely: for example, in popular places, it is difficult to get to the top of searches. Keep that in mind.

4. Block inactive users

Plan a health day for your account. This is a day when you block accounts that have Arabic and Turkish letters or that follow more than 1000 other accounts. Users that follow 1000 or more accounts will rarely see your profile.

The algorithm randomly shows your post to some of your subscribers and if they like it, the social network shows the post to other subscribers, which gives a strong increase in audience engagement. If the algorithm randomly selects accounts that follow a lot of other accounts, they will not react to your content. Hence, your photo or video will remain at the bottom of the news feed.

5. Conduct a giveaway

In order to increase involvement in your giveaway, you should create rules. The most common rules are:

Follow your social account;
Like 5 posts;
Write 3 comments.

If participants like your post and write comments, involvement increases. If they repost, their friends can subscribe to you. The usual formats of “follow, like, and get a prize” will also work. But it’s better to do something unusual: to organize a quiz, riddles, make a mini-marathon.

You could give away some company products among the most active members of the community, for example.

Unusual giveaways are more effective than standard ones because they interest users. Remember that the better the prize, the more participants will perform the tasks.

Conclusion

Here is a summary and some bonus tips to maximize engagement with your social media content:

Perform a total social account cleanup – block those who follow more than 1000 other accounts.
Make a revision of your strategy for social engagement growth. Create a content plan if you do not already have one. Make quality, interesting content for your audience.
Use stories. They bring views, allow the account to be more visible among subscribers and your target audience.
Don’t forget about calls to action and questions that involve users in discussion.
Don’t use more than 20 hashtags, 3-5 relevant, and targeted hashtags are enough.
Provide value to your audience and show that behind the company, are emotional, lively, and interesting people.

Guest author: Alyse Falk is a freelance writer with experience in digital marketing, technologies, content marketing, marketing trends, and branding strategies. Alyse also writes for several reputable sites where she shares her hints for creating content.

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