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How To Boost Engagement With Social Media Marketing (5 Tips)

Whether you have an online store, blog, or company website, […]

social media marketing

Whether you have an online store, blog, or company website, social media is the way to go to increase engagement, promote your content, and build brand awareness. It’s an effective tool that grabs users’ attention and gets them talking. With 3.48 billion social media users in 2019, there’s no time for your brand to waste to achieve its goals.

Once you’ve got your audience’s attention, how do you keep it there? Brands already use social media to promote their products and services, but what can they do to improve how customers interact with them? It’s challenging to prolong user engagement, but with the right tactics, your brand could see a spike in interactions.

Let’s dive into five tips you can use social media to increase user engagement with your brand.

1. Create a contest

People love to win, so why not give them something to celebrate? A great way to garner attention to your brand and encourage engagement is by creating a contest. This builds brand awareness, promotes your content or products, and captures leads. 

You can only reach these objectives if you run your contest the right way. RafflePress makes it easy to increase engagement by using social media integrations. When users complete an action you want them to take, such as following you on social media or joining your email list, they get extra entries. The more actions they take, the likelier they are to win the contest.

Users can also invite their friends to join your contest so they do the work for you to spread the word.

2. Provide excellent customer service

Want to know the fastest way to lose engagement and potential customers? Give them a terrible customer service experience. People value the relationship they share with their favorite brands. If yours isn’t available to provide support, answer questions, and solve problems, you’ll see a steep decline in engagement.

There are several ways you can use social media to boost your customer service efforts so they reach your target market’s standards. Since 89 percent of customers switch to a competitor after a poor experience, it’s essential to have a strategy in place to help your customers.

Your audience spends a lot of time on social media, and as such, providing customer service on these channels is vital to boost user engagement. In fact, 44 percent of consumers say they feel more connected to a brand if they participate in conversations with them on social platforms. 

Xbox created an entirely separate Twitter account just for handling customer services issues with social media users:

Search specific keywords and hashtags to track any issues, complaints, or errors your audience faces with your business. If users mention you on social media directly, it’s crucial to respond to them as soon as possible. If you don’t have a solution yet, reaching out lets them know you care and are working towards one.

Quality customer service provides users with quick responses and uses a proactive approach. It personalizes the experience so your customers don’t feel like they’re another sales number. If you have an in-house customer service team, they can’t work around the clock to help customers. Once visitors move from social media to your website, you can provide outsourced customer service using live chat and chatbots to ensure the best results. 

3. Use conversational forms

When a brand you know sends you a survey, how likely are you to fill it out all the way? Because most surveys aren’t created for engagement and don’t put much thought into the user experience, they face high incompletion rates. You can avoid this by creating a conversational survey for your audience.

More businesses use social media features like surveys and polls to collect feedback, boost engagement, and drive traffic to their website. You can do this with conversational surveys by linking users on social media back to your website where they’ll complete the form. Since 81 percent of users abandon a form before filling it out, it’s important to encourage completion.

Conversational surveys are effective because they mirror a face-to-face conversation. Rather than a long list of questions users feel disinterested in answering, it provides an interactive experience that feels less transactional. Use conversational forms for user registration, job applications, event planning, and more.

4. Incorporate social proof

It’s difficult for any consumer to invest in your brand if the value you offer them isn’t made obvious. If other people aren’t raving about it, no one will care. A staggering 92 percent of customers trust recommendations from family and friends over advertising. You can use this to your advantage by incorporating social proof into your social media marketing strategy. 

Social proof is a psychological phenomenon that sparks something in people when they see others enjoying a product or service. When it comes to millennial customers, 60 percent say they purchased a product after experiencing FOMO seeing others use it. It makes them want to copy the actions they see to create the same feelings of joy or excitement. So, when users see examples of social proof on a brand’s social media or website, it encourages them to invest in that brand.

Examples of social proof include:

The best way to garner a substantial social media following and encourage social shares is by creating compelling content suited for your target audience. Create buyer personas of your customers so you have information about their interests, demographics, purchasing behaviors, pain points, and more. 

5. Implement visuals

Nothing grabs your audience’s attention like visual content. It breaks the monotony of text and gives them something interesting to look at and interact with. There has to be a reason why 80 percent of marketers use visuals in their social media marketing, and that’s because it’s effective.

Images, videos, and other visual content encourage engagement from users by drawing their attention. Since most people are visual learners, this helps them consume and process your content faster. 

The great thing about visual content is that there are endless ways you can use it to boost engagement. Use images to promote your latest products, videos to demonstrate how to use them, and infographics to outline their benefits to your customers. 

Taco Bell uses images in their Facebook post to promote their menu items and lead visitors to their YouTube channel, furthering their engagement:

Encourage your social media followers to create user-generated content (UGC) you can repost onto your account. This shows new visitors that people genuinely do use and enjoy your products and services, which boosts credibility. It’s also a way for your audience to use their creativity to engage with your brand and express how they use it to their advantage.

Burt’s Bees uses UGC to boost their social media engagement by creating rules that further their reach, such as following their account and using a branded hashtag:

Wrapping up

It’s your turn to refine your social media marketing strategy so it includes ways to increase user engagement. Once you have your audience’s attention, it’s crucial to ensure you keep it. Taking steps to keep their interest is worth it to help your brand achieve its goals and reach higher levels of success. 

To recap, create a contest that entices your audience both old and new. Use social media to your advantage to connect with customers and give them valuable solutions. Lead your followers to conversational surveys where you can collect feedback and drive traffic to your website. Don’t forget to use social proof to build trust with customers and implement visual content to grab their attention and keep it. How will you boost engagement using social platforms?