Social media interaction is important when it comes to using your social media channels effectively to increase brand awareness and find new leads. For instance, too many businesses are so focused on gaining new followers, they neglect to interact with the audience they do have. Of course, growing your audience is important and it can be incredibly difficult at first. There are services to help you do this, and you can head here to read more on that.
With social media, it is very much a case of quality and not quantity when it comes to your followers. While a large following can help grow brand awareness, this will always be an untapped resource if you do not engage and interact.
When you focus on interaction overgrowth, you are helping your brand to convert followers into customers and you strengthen the relationship you have with existing customers. Read on to learn how you can improve your social media interaction.
Be sure to use images in all your social posts
There are social channels that require an image, Instagram for example, but this is not true across all social channels. For example, platforms like Twitter and Facebook have no image requirement if you wish to post, but it is still crucial to add a relevant image in every post you create and share.
Imagery is an excellent way to boost social media reach and interaction. Why? Images are eye-catching, they draw the viewer to the post, and they invoke a range of emotions. This is in stark contrast to posts that contain only text – these posts blend into the background and are not easily noticed.
Tweets that have images attached are boosted by retweets by an impressive 35%. Facebook posts that have images included receive 37% more interaction. It is clear, by just these two examples, that images in posts are going to help you and your brand a lot more than purely text-based posts.
There is, however, always an exception. Linkedin posts attract more attention when they have no images or videos. The lesson here is that you should examine each platform that you intend to use, to see what type of post gains more traction on that particular platform. That said, generally speaking, posts with images are the way to go.
Interact with your audience
Interacting with your followers is crucial to improving your social media engagement on the whole. When a comment is left on one of your posts, or someone sends you a direct message, this is a golden opportunity to interact and create a relationship.
When you receive a question, message or a follower has a concern of some kind, it is important to respond. This is equally true when a follower leaves a positive comment – reply with appreciation. Responding directly with followers, or interacting with their content, is going to make them feel appreciated, and this will encourage them to engage further with your content – including sharing it with their own followers.
Post content people want to interact with
If your focus is improving your social media interactions, then make sure that you are posting content that engages. What does that mean? Simply put, this means posting content that encourages interaction from followers. This type of content could be questions, polls, quizzes etc. These are excellent ways to drive engagement which, in turn, will provide you with opportunities to interact with them.
If you are in a position to, contests and giveaways are another way to encourage your current followers to engage with your brand as well as attract potential new followers to you.
For example, you could post a service or product giveaway and encourage people to like, comment, share, tag three friends etc. Be sure that the rules of the contest (and be sure to make these clear) that anyone participating in the contest has to follow your page. This type of post will receive more likes, comments and shares than other posts but don’t do them too often – a general rule is once a month at most.
Use analytics to your advantage
If you want to improve your business’s social media engagement and interactions, and it is assumed this is the case, then you need to take a look as to where your engagement stands right now. Whether you are using a 3rd party tool for social media analytics, or the tools the platform provides, analytics is something that every business has access to and needs to be using.
Analytics have important data regarding engagement and interactions. Collating data such as the times and days that your followers are more active, what types of posts have performed better and which have the best interaction rate is crucial in improving your engagement.
Regularly posting when your target audience is more active, and posting popular content types is going to help you plan future posts and they are going to perform better than they would otherwise.
Be sure to look at the analytics for each social account that you have because each platform will show different results. For instance, if you see online that 1 pm is the best time to post on Instagram, using analytics you can see where the majority of your audience is so you can post when it’s 1 pm for them. If your business is in the GMT (Greenwich) Mean Time timezone and your audience majority is in MST (Mountain Standard Time) then you need to post at 8 pm. This is because MST is 7 hours behind GMT.
Audience behaviour can vary from platform to platform, too. Have a close look at your analytics for each of the platforms that you use. There is a good chance that you will find that your content performs better on one platform over another, or that your audience demographics are different from one platform to another.
By making use of the capabilities of a social media scheduling tool, you can stay consistent with your approach. A lot of the tips and tricks that you will need are already provided in your analytics, so be sure you are checking them regularly so you can cater your content to your audience.
