Higher social media engagement equals more clickthroughs, more web traffic, more fans and more purchases so it’s something we all want.
A quick look at this live social media activity tracker will tell you just how fierce the competition has become. Brands are vying for attention from fans across all the platforms and social media managers around the globe are searching for new ways to grab audience attention and improve their social media engagement.
Click through to see these numbers scroll in real time.
It’s not easy because your competition may include big brands spending thousands on video, marketing teams with large creative teams and brands who already have a large fan count.
So here we go with the best secret social media engagement hacks you need to know about!
Secret Social Media Engagement Hack 1: Leverage Social Proof
Social proof can give you a powerful psychological advantage when it comes to social media engagement. Before you get comfortable on the white couch, I’m not a psychologist. I do, however know that there are some psychological techniques which can be employed to improve your social media engagement.
You’re so busy analyzing traffic, clicks, and conversions that you may have forgotten there are real people involved. That’s where we need to leverage the power of psychology to engage them.
Social proof basically means following the herd, a bit like wanting to be in the popular group in high school. On social media, this can be a powerful tool because you’re not telling fans to engage with your brand — their friends and online idols are!
Here are three social media engagement hacks to leverage social proof.
Encourage Reviews
When you see an ad for a product online what’s the first thing you do?
You check the reviews.
When you see multiple positive reviews for a product online, you are more likely to follow the company and make a purchase or a booking. In fact, 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations while 33% trust ads say Conductor.com.
Check out these reviews from Ousia, a popular restaurant in Cyprus, for example. Reading people’s positive experiences about a brand, place, or service is likely to inspire others to follow. You can also embed real reviews onto your website using tools like Kudobuzz. This is so much more believable than those stock photos with the made-up reviews… you know the ones!
If you need a way to manage your Facebook reviews, simply hook up your fan page to Agorapulse. From there you can monitor, assign, or reply to your reviews.
Display Shares
Top marketing sites like Agorapulse display social shares on their blog posts which immediately show others the popularity of the article. For online stores, the “recommend to a friend” button is an essential.
Remember too that proper placement of social media sharing buttons can have a significant impact on the shares that you receive. After making their ‘Share This’ icon more prominent, Advanced Micro Devices was able to increase their social media sharing by 3,600%.
Utilize Influencers
Another powerful social proof technique involves utilizing the power of influencers. For the big brands, this may be celebrities, models or sports people. For you, it could be other businesses you’ve collaborated with, social media users with high fan counts or customers with a high social media status.
Tagging influencers or other brands lends credibility to your posts, as well as notifying those tagged that they’re being talked about and therefore compelling them to share with their own audience. Viewers of your social page may also perceive you to be well established, well connected and trusted by industry names which can encourage higher trust levels.
Create multiple, unique posts and tag influencers individually or produce a roundup and thank them all.
Secret Social Media Engagement Hack 2: Repeat Your Content
If you’re writing a blog post and then sharing it once, you’re missing out on a huge piece of the social media pie! The most successful social media marketers repurpose their content so that it reaches the maximum number of fans and achieves genuine ROI. So let’s look at some of the other social media engagement hacks that can help us out:
Repurposing Content
In order to repurpose your content, you need to have a plan from the start. If you have spent a considerable amount of time writing and researching a piece then you will want to make sure everyone sees it. Here are some of the ways you can do that:
- Transform articles into video scripts
- Make staff interviews into a storytelling series
- Turn presentations into eBooks or Slideshare presentations
- Create matching images for each social media channel
- Turn boring statistics into colorful infographics
- Plan an email marketing campaign linking to your blog
- Plan an SMS to drive traffic to the piece
Rescheduling Content
If you tweet your offer or blog post just once, then you are really minimizing the chances of your audiences engaging with you.
Use the Agorapulse content calendar to easily repeat, requeue and reschedule your popular content. Change the image, add or remove video and adjust the hashtags to create “new” posts.
You can see in the example below that I have chosen to repeat my holiday blog tweets every five days throughout December.
I can do that for as many social accounts and as many posts as I like, meaning my fans are engaging with me even when I’m not online.
Reusing Evergreen Content
If you’re tasked with the content and social media management for a brand then you might be too busy to think about fresh content to improve your social media engagement. That’s why I like to make a list of evergreen and time sensitive content that I have on my blog at Charli Says. For example, the below post is pretty evergreen.
However, the below example is time sensitive and limited to 2017. Not only because of the title but also because techniques move fast in the world of SEO, it may become outdated quickly:
Once you identify evergreen posts, keep it repeating in your queue until a specific end date. In the SEO/2017 example, you’ll want to keep things going until the end of 2017 — beyond that point will look super awkward.
It’s easy to do this using a solid queue system like Agorapulse.
This way you can “set it and forget it” without having the tweet go ad infinitum.
Secret Social Media Engagement Hack 3: Gage The Mood
Social media engagement is all about seizing the mood of your fans and running with it. That might be by utilizing trending topics, asking thought provoking questions or even sparking a debate.
Get Happy
Posts with a higher emotional value get higher shares on social media networks so the aim is always to tap into an emotion. However, among the 4 emotions (happiness, sadness, fear and anger) – Happiness is the one that will get the most engagement… YAY! Positive social media posts get an average of 1.75 more positive responses than negative posts which get 1.29.
Know What’s Trending
If you care about the engagement of your social media posts then you need to know what’s trending. Whether it’s #SundayFunday, #HarryandMeghan or #MerryChristmas, it’s important to know what everyone’s talking about. This doesn’t mean that you need to insert your brand into every conversation, in fact, please don’t! However, do your research and you may find a trending hashtag that fits well with your product offering. Try to stay away from politics or controversial topics, especially if they have nothing to do with your brand. Instead, look for fun or interesting hashtags that you can use for your message. You can also use Twitter’s “Events” tab to check what is likely to be trending in the coming weeks and months.
Create A Buzz
Want social media engagement hacks that create a buzz? Nothing sparks engagement like a bit of marketing buzz… if you do it right that is!
Brands like Look Fantastic are masters of social media buzz because they use photos, excitement and time sensitive posts to create higher fan engagement. You can see from their post below that they are ticking all the boxes with a Christmas countdown linking to their Christmas products page. You know there’s only so many shopping days left … right?
Boosting engagement is something that everyone can do, it just needs a little lateral thinking and a bit of social media magic dust! Which is your favourite of our social media engagement hacks? Tweet us and let us know!