“I am consistent with my social media posting, but I still fail to see an increase in followers or leads.”
Does this sound like you? Does generating leads and building a more prominent brand for your business through social media seem challenging? What if we told you that monitoring a few social media engagement metrics can make all the difference?
Yes, you heard it right. The key to unlocking the full potential of your social media presence is to improve your engagement rates.
This article discusses the critical aspects of engaging your audience on social media, its benefits, and how to leverage it to grow your business.
Table of contents
What is social media engagement?
The term social media engagement describes the actions a customer might take to interact with your content or your social media profile as a whole. Likes, comments, direct messages, retweets, shares, and replies fall under this umbrella term.
Without investing in social media engagement, the content becomes a one-way communication wherein the brand is just there to announce events or launches without any effort into the response. Engagement that comes from opening the way for two-way communication is essential to social media success.
Even with a brilliant strategy and the best content, brands would only see a real impact with the means to generate engagement.
Why is social media engagement important for your business?
What impact does social media have on a business? Engaging with your social media audience and replying to comments and messages can be a huge undertaking for any business, especially one managing multiple locations.
So it’s fair to want to know what the ROI really is.
Broadly speaking, engaging your audience on social media generates the right audience for your business page. Any content on social media encounters two kinds of audiences – one that views the content while scrolling through it without any interaction and one that takes the time and effort to do so.
Your most active audience on social media has a higher potential to become leads and, eventually, customers. They help your brand by generating momentum on your content, creating user-generated content, and helping you reach more people on social media.
With a higher social media engagement rate, your business can:
Generate a higher brand awareness
The more people interact with your content, the more the social media algorithm shows it to newer audiences. An active audience can turn your business into a household name.
Open a feedback channel
Every business wants to know what their customers feel about them and what they can do better to generate higher sales. An engaged social media audience gives you voluntary feedback and helps you validate all your ideas.
Acquire relevant audience
You know you have reached your target audience when they interact with your content consistently. More people engaging with your content shows your content and profile to other like-minded people. You gain more followers due to this additional visibility to people who resemble your target audience closely.
Build a stronger sales pipeline
A higher rate of engagement does precisely what every business wants from its online presence- leads and sales. Yes, it gets you more leads and ways to interact with potential customers to convince them and close a deal. Social commerce has helped many businesses turn their engaged audience into customers, and this is just the beginning.
How to measure social media engagement?
Every business has a certain share of uncertainty regarding its social media engagement. With platforms tweaking algorithms too often and fluctuating audience behavior, it’s hard to know if you are going the right way.
Monitoring and measuring your engagement can help you understand your position and take steps to improve as needed.
How to monitor social media engagement?
Measuring engagement metrics is only possible when you have the right ways to monitor it. Most of the engagement metrics that we will discuss in the next section rely on social media monitoring to give them the correct numbers.
So how do you monitor it to measure its impact and growth?
Analyze platform metrics
Each social media platform shares reporting metrics with its users so that they can see the impact that the content has. Social media executives must report on these numbers diligently so that they can measure their engagement on these social media channels for your business.
Leverage social media management tools
Using metrics from the social media channel’s analytics section for large-scale businesses with multiple locations can be challenging and cumbersome. The team would have to download reports separately and collate them if they have multiple social media accounts per their locations and branding.
A more accessible alternative would be using a social media management tool like Birdeye that helps you access all your reporting information from a single dashboard. This way, you can get reports for each platform and location, making measuring social engagement much more manageable.
Hire a social media manager
Do you have an active social media page that needs you to stay on top of the metrics more than once a month? Or suppose you have a significant social media campaign coming up that requires constant attention to engagement. In that case, hiring a social media manager and any other tools you may have is essential.
With these techniques, you will have the data you need to measure social media engagement for your business.
Measuring social media engagement for your business
Broadly, there are two ways of measuring social media engagement:
- By impact
- By metrics
Measuring social media engagement by impact
- Customer support impact
Social media channels are becoming a top choice for customer support queries. Customers find it easier to hop on Twitter or Instagram to talk to the brand than choose other means like email or phone.
To measure the success of your engagement efforts, tracking how many customer support queries the team has responded to is an excellent place to start.
Resolving customer support issues via social media quickly can help you boost the brand’s likeability and trustworthiness.
To measure this, you can report on the following:
- The volume of customer support queries handled by social media
- Turnaround time for resolution
- Change in volume of customer support queries on other channels
These will tell you if the social media efforts are moving in the right direction.
- Brand reach impact
One of the primary reasons businesses take the time to build a strong media presence is to improve brand awareness. Improved brand awareness and reach is an indication of the impact your engagement efforts have.
You can reach brand reach on social media by tracking:
- Volume of engagement
- Total accounts reached within a given time
- Rate of follower growth
Note: Accounts reached is a total sum of people whose feed your content has reached. While not all of those accounts engage with your content, it’s a good passive metric to track and understand the engagement impact.
Measuring social media engagement via popular metrics
On average, a social media manager tracks more than ten metrics or key performance indicators for their accounts. But metrics especially indicate growth in social engagement for your business.
The standard social media metrics to track to measure social media engagement are:
- Engagement rate:
A traditional measure of engagement is to directly measure the percentage of your social media audience that engages with your content. The formula for calculating engagement has evolved in the last few years.
Earlier, you would measure it as a percentage of followers engaging with the content from your total followers; experts recommend that you now do so as a percentage of the content’s reach.
With changing social media algorithms, branded content rarely reaches 100% of your followers. By excluding inactive fans that didn’t see the content, you can get a more accurate estimate of the engagement rate.
- Growth rate:
Growth rate helps you understand if your social media account is heading in the right direction. You can measure this metric as a difference between the follower count of any two consecutive periods – monthly, quarterly, or annually.
- Share rate:
Sharing is one of the most critical engagement actions on any social media channel. Shares improves the reach of your content drastically and is an important metric to measure social media engagement. You can calculate the share rate of your social media content by measuring it as a percentage of the total impressions on the post.
Related read: A complete guide on social media metrics to track
How to increase social media engagement?
Increasing engagement on your business’s social media pages can help you reap huge benefits from your efforts. From brand awareness to converting potential customers, an active social media page can do it all for your business.
But social media is more complex than it used to be. Algorithms get updated and consumer preferences change every now and then. And when you have to manage a large business, you have less time and resources but bigger goals. This means the team must up their game quickly and see results.
Follow our expert-recommended strategies to improve your engagement metrics drastically.
Understand your audience
Your social media audience is a mix of people from various locations, age groups, income levels, and buying habits will be a part of it. And this is often unique to each business. So, it becomes essential to understand this unique audience section your content will reach.
Understanding the audience demographics can help you build a content strategy based on their preferences. It will also help you identify what social media content is best for each platform. It’s different because you need unique content for each platform, but it needs a few tweaks to perform well on different platforms.
For example, your follower composition on Twitter may not be the same as that on Instagram. Understanding your audience on each page helps you repurpose content correctly and win over your target audiences.
Identify the best content style for each platform
While your content should vary per your demographic, you must choose the content format or style based on the platform on which it’s being posted. Every social media channel has a popular content format/style that its algorithm pushes out more. If you want to improve your engagement rate, choose the best format on that platform.
Video content works well on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, while strong text turned into threads on Twitter can generate the most engagement.
Bottom line: Don’t adopt a one size fits all approach to your content strategy.
Build a personality
Social media users like to engage with brands with a unique style. The more you express your brand identity by developing a personality online, the higher your engagement will be.
Recent studies suggest that a brand’s self-expression significantly impacts its engagement. With all other consumer-related factors being the same, a strong social media personality can be a game-changer.
Use engagement driving CTAs
Sometimes you must ask for things you want your audience to do explicitly. Don’t let the audience hang when you have great content. Give them ideas on interacting with the content if they like it.
Use compelling call-to-action phrases like “Like if you agree,” “Comment your opinion,” and “Tag your friends in the comment section” to invite them to engage with your content.
Note: For these call-to-action phrases to work, the content must also be immensely engaging for your audience. If you are wondering what to create on social media, check out our detailed blog on post ideas to generate higher engagement.
Engage with the audience proactively
Social media is a two-way street. When your audience likes, comments, or shares your content, it’s vital that you proactively step into the conversation. This makes your social media audience feel seen and important.
Some way to do this would be to engage with user-generated content centered on your brand. In fact, user-generated content is one of the most talked about topics in the world of social media and digital marketing.
Pro Tip: Track brand mentions and interact with customers already engaging with your brand to boost the reach further. Something as simple as replying to comments on your page can immensely boost your engagement metrics.
Leverage trends
Real-time marketing or creating content on trending topics can greatly impact your business’s engagement on social media.
Most social media users like to participate in trends and trending content becomes more share-worthy than usual content. Brands that monitor trending topics and instantly jump into the conversation see a huge increase in their engagement rates.
Note: It’s important to remember that not every trend is for every business. It’s essential to choose the right social media trends that resonate with your brand’s personality and would be received well by your followers.
Schedule your content at peak times
In an ideal scenario, whenever you publish a social media post, it should immediately be seen by your followers and most social media users on the platform. But that isn’t always the case. Each platform has a peak activity period during which most users are online and engaging with content.
Businesses must make the most of these periods and schedule their content to be published when most of the intended audience is online. This immediately brings a ton of engagement to the post and helps boost its reach too.
Related read: Best time to post on each social media platform
Experiment, analyze, and repeat
If your business has just begun working on social media, it will be a while before you can understand what content brings you the most engagement. To do so, brands must experiment with different content types, such as videos, carousel posts, memes, educational posts, product posts, branded posts, etc.
Analyze the engagement and impact of these posts over a period of time to understand what your audience wants from you. And this will differ by platform. For example, consumers look for funny content the most on Facebook, and Instagram is their source of information about businesses and products.
Understand each platform’s requirements, experiment, and repeat the content that resonates with your audience.
Frequently asked questions on social media engagement
TikTok is the platform with the highest engagement rate of 4.25% as of 2023. Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter follow it.
Brands must focus on creating meaningful and trending content on social media that encourages followers to interact with it. Analyze your best-performing content and replicate the results to engage your audience successfully.
Reach on social media only describes how many feeds your content has reached, while engagement measures the audience interacting with your content.
The five drivers of social media engagement are the connected, network, information, dynamic, and timeliness effects. It describes the different reasons customers would interact with your content.
Video content that is funny, relatable, and engaging gets the most engagement on social media.
Boost your social media impact with Birdeye
A higher social media engagement can help your business boost its growth, leads, and revenue. To achieve that, you must actively monitor, measure, and innovate to produce engaging social media content across all platforms.
Birdeye Social helps you monitor all your social media accounts, engage with your audience, and track brand mentions from a single dashboard. It helps you generate customized reports to suit your needs too.
Watch our free demo to learn how Birdeye can help you build an engaged audience.
This blog post is part of our Social Media Management Guide
Originally published
