Having a list of ways to engage members on social media is the most powerful tool to have in your possession as an organization.
Undoubtedly, social networks are an invaluable resource, helping you reach nearly 4.59 billion social media users daily. Without a proper engagement strategy, you'll miss out on fantastic opportunities to build a loyal audience through your social media posts.
Thus, let's explore six unique ways to engage members on your social media channels to grow your community and develop a meaningful bond with your members.
Quick Reads
- Find Something That Will Set You Apart
- Respond To All Comments
- Ask Questions
- Use Relevant Hashtags
- Create a Challenge
- Use a Private Community App
- Average Social Media Reach and How to Track It
- Start Engaging Your Community Today!
1. Find Something That Will Set You Apart
As someone who avidly browses social media channels, there's nothing more boring than brands that post all the same content. Sure, using trends can be a great way to bring in a larger audience, but copying your competition with every post can be a little underwhelming.
As your brand's social media manager, always ensure your social platforms have something unique to bring to the table.
The more authentic your content is, the more interesting you'll be to your target audience. It will also help you differentiate yourself from other brands in your niche, making your social media channels stand out.
Not to mention it shows you're putting a lot more effort into the type of content you want to share compared to other organizations.
Read more: 8 Ways to Use Content to Acquire and Engage Your Members
People tend to prefer brands that put much effort into their social media platforms. As such, the more unique your posts are, the higher your social media engagement will be.
You might find weird and kooky IG posts attract more likes and shares, while wild tweets might be retweeted and quote-tweeted more often. Some of our favorite tips for finding something that will set you apart include:
Develop a Brand Voice
It's easier for customers to relate to brands when they have a specific voice and vision they stick to. Whether you're posting on Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube, stick to the same brand voice, as it comes across as earnest and transparent.
You can even use weird text generators to use funky graphics and text associated with your brand.
Don't Be Afraid to Have a Personality
It's far too often that brands are afraid to share a personality through their different types of posts. When in reality, a social media personality can be amazing.
If you can develop fresh content that's easy to relate to, your engagement numbers will skyrocket.
Use Your Member Reviews
The majority of your competitors are likely missing out on using customer reviews to their advantage. Feedback is fantastic for establishing a membership funnel and gives you valuable information as an association.
Always listen to your members, as they can help you refine your content to bring in the highest-performing strategies for better engagement.
Be Transparent
One of the most important parts of engagement efforts is to make sure you're honest and open with your members.
Inauthentic brands are easy to spot from a mile away, and people often avoid them since they aren't as personable as small businesses. The more transparent you are through social media engagement tools, the better your social media strategy will perform.
Content Comes First
Traditional organizations tend to sacrifice interactive content for sharing a message or promotion with their audiences. This often comes across as inauthentic and promotional, such as ad and partnered posts.
Always try putting your content first, sharing interesting videos and photos with your audience, and integrating your message.
We must state that social media isn’t all about videos and photos. Sometimes, your audience type may lean toward textual content, so videos and photos may not be the best tools.
The good news is that platforms like LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Reddit make room for sharing textual content. With these platforms, you can share interesting, informative articles that engage the audience and boost your brand’s search engine presence.
2. Respond To All Comments
When you think about how your audience engages with your popular content, it's usually through comments.
Comments are a fantastic spot to start conversations while connecting with your engaged audience and keeping them involved in your social media marketing. As a brand, one of the best things you can do for your engagement is respond to the feedback left on your posts positively and professionally.
Aside from reading feedback from potential customers, your comment sections are great for sharing your brand voice. You can form lasting connections with your loyal audience while keeping your content fresh and showing your personable side.
Not to mention comments are usually the only spot where you can add important information for your followers to read, aside from captions. When dealing with comments, you should use two main methods: proactive and reactive engagement.
With proactive engagement, you'll start a conversation with people indirectly talking about you. It's a great way to reach out and communicate with all parts of your audience, even if you're not directly mentioned. Reactive engagement is the second way to engage with your audience and is the most common. With this method, you're directly answering comments, DMs, or mentions.
By combining proactive and reactive engagement, you can cover all the bases for connecting with real people in your audience. Not only will it boost your social media engagement metrics but it can also encourage users to drop you a "like" or follow your page. A few extra tips to consider when responding to all comments on your page include:
Professionalism Is Key
It doesn't matter whether you're responding to negative or positive feedback; make sure to keep it professional.
Member engagement puts your organization’s best foot forward, and you'll want to ensure you're representing your organization properly. It can leave a bad impression on customers when you don't act professionally.
Answer Comments Frequently
When managing social engagement, it's best if you stay on top of your comments throughout the day. It helps to show you actively monitor your social media and care about what your audience has to say.
With frequent customer engagement, you can answer questions and manage concerns quickly.
Save Online Engagement for Later
Did you know that your comments are a fantastic resource to help boost your organization’s social proof and reputation?
Comments often act as reviews and testimonials that you can use in promotional posts. It's a great idea to save all your best comments in a client management software program to track all your top reviewers.
3. Ask Questions
One of the most challenging parts of member engagement is getting your audience to interact with your content fully.
In most instances, you may notice your followers drop a like on your promotional posts, boosting your digital engagement metrics. However, your likes-to-comments ratio may be unbalanced, and comments are the most enriching form of engagement to have.
What better way to stimulate a conversation than to ask your audience questions that they can answer across your platforms?
Questions are a fantastic way to add to the engagement equation and encourage people to leave a comment on your posts. It's also a great way to lead up to promotional posts, especially if you're doing a giveaway where your followers need to engage with your content to be entered into the contest.
Read more: 8 Best Digital Contest Ideas to Drive Massive Community Engagement
You'll find that by asking questions, you'll bring more comments to your business profile and learn about your audience.
When you do a brief analysis of posts, you'll see what things your fanbase likes the most and certain things they don't like. Using this information, you can refine your membership website and social media content to meet their every need.
Let's look at a few great ways to start asking social media questions for business growth.
Start Using Polls
Polls are an amazing way to boost engagement, especially on platforms like Instagram, where you can add polls to your Stories and Reels.
With polls, you can engage with your audience and get an idea of where their opinions lie. You can use polls to get advice on upcoming products, figure out when to start marketing campaigns, and more.
Add Questions to Captions
One of the most effective places to put questions for your audience to answer is in the captions of your posts.
As your followers review your content, they'll be more likely to respond to your photo or video if you prompt them with a question. In return, you can respond to their answers which can foster healthy communication.
Using Questions for Contest Ideas
As mentioned, questions are a fantastic addition to contests and promos hosted through your social media channels. If you need a surefire way to boost your engagement metrics, have your audience answer questions as part of their contest entry.
4. Use Relevant Hashtags
Relevant hashtags are a must-have for maintaining conversations with customers on a few different platforms.
According to Neil Patel, posts with 11+ hashtags tend to get over 80% more interaction than posts without, especially if you use niche hashtags on platforms like Instagram. Relevant hashtags are much different than generic hashtags, and it's a notable difference to consider.
With relevant hashtags, you'll be looking at tags that directly relate to your posted content and brand. Instead of opting for trending tags or generic tags, relevant hashtags categorize your content in your specific niche along with your competitors.
They help make reaching your target audience easier on both smaller and larger scales.
One of the best ways to use hashtags to start a conversation is to rely on branded tags. Branded hashtags are typically associated with your brand or a specific promotion you might be running.
Let's look at how you can optimize your hashtags across the most popular social platforms.
Undoubtedly, hashtags are vital on Twitter for growth, and hashtags can bring twice as much engagement to your profile. Try to keep your total number of tags between two and five; the more you use, the worse your content will perform.
On this platform, you can use up to 30 hashtags per post, but it's best if you limit how many you use. Too many hashtags on IG can come across as tacky, and you should hide your tags deep in your caption or in a comment after publishing.
The best advice for Instagram hashtags is to use niche tags that revolve around your industry.
Hashtagging on Facebook is somewhat new as they came onto the platform in 2013. That said, tags are a great way to access communication channels with your audience. You can categorize your posts to make your brand show up in customer searches. It can be helpful to test your Facebook hashtags regularly to ensure they remain relevant.
YouTube
YouTube is another platform where hashtags are often used in titles and descriptions. On average, accounts can use up to 15 tags before being penalized by Google, making them an effective marketing tool.
5. Create a Challenge
Who doesn't love getting their hands dirty with a social media challenge?
One of the most fundamental aspects of the engagement equation is to make engaging with your brand fun and exciting for your audience. Without a purpose for engagement, a lot of users would scroll past your content without interacting with it.
When you design a challenge, promotion, or contest, your average engagement rates are bound to skyrocket.
For example, say you create a fun challenge asking users to use a weird text generator to truncate popular quotes. Such a challenge will surely get people’s attention and keep them engaged with your page as everyone will want to showcase what they’ve come up with.
Along with increasing engagement, a challenge or contest can help to boost your brand awareness, leads, and followers. The more eyes you can get on your content and the more chances people have to win, the more premium experiences your members can enjoy.
That said, you must develop a content engagement strategy that makes your content unique and enticing.
You'll want to decide your end goals (boosted engagement), settle on a creative angle, and ensure the contest aligns with your brand's voice. Then, you have to consider whether you'll use influencers to share your contest, make sure you're following the platform's guidelines, and do other organizational duties.
There are a ton of great ways you can work on bringing a challenge to your social media profiles.
Commenting and Liking to Win
Regardless of the promotion, a surefire way to increase engagement is to require certain actions for entry.
Commenting and liking boost your digital engagement tenfold while giving your followers entries into your contest.
Read more: How Can Chapters Improve Virtual Member Engagement Efforts Using Digital Transformation?
Don't Forget About Sharing
An often-forgotten part of the engagement that can grow your popularity significantly is sharing.
You should always require your audience to share your post as a method of entry, as this brings more eyes to your challenge with every follower you have. You'll reach their list of followers, their follower's followers, and so on.
Make the Challenge Engaging
An engaging contest is bound to bring more traffic than a boring piece of content.
You'll want to think of challenges that keep your community active as they participate. For example, require them to upload a photo or video to enter your contest, which will also give you ample user-generated content.
Tagging Can Be Helpful
Another great option to help spread awareness of your association and your challenge is to require contest entrants to tag a friend.
Although this won't reach as large of an audience as sharing, it's a guaranteed way to get at least one extra person viewing your post. Plus, it counts as a comment on your platform for your engagement metrics.
6. Use a Private Community App
Private community apps allow you to keep in touch with your audience from anywhere at any time.
With platforms like Glue Up, you can create a diverse community of followers where you can get valuable insights and spark more meaningful conversations.
As a growing brand, communicating with your audience has never been more important and Glue Up's community management app is a must-have. There are a ton of fascinating features you can get from the community app, including:
Numerous Engagement Types
You'll never run out of ways to stay in touch with your members in your community hub. You'll have a live feed of comments, discussion boards, and other social sharing options to keep a line of communication open.
Networking Opportunities
Glue Up masters the art of in-person and digital networking all in one place. You can host one-on-one chats, exchange digital business cards, and @mention people on content posted on the platform.
Customizations
When managing a community hub, you'll want to ensure all the right members have the right permissions. With Glue Up, you can set up content moderation, assign permissions and roles, and customize filters. Overall, a private community app helps you network with those who mean the most to your association - your members.
Average Social Media Reach and How to Track It
The final step to finding ways to engage members on social media is to know how to measure your social media reach.
As you begin implementing new engagement strategies, managing their success can help you to focus on the most important elements. There's one key way to measure your social reach, and it requires the use of a very simple calculation:
Content Reach = (# of new impressions/total # of followers) x100
Imagine you post a new photo on your feed. If the photo attracts 200 new comments, followers, or likes, those count as your impressions. You'll then want to divide your new impressions by your existing number of comments, followers, or likes.
Multiplying this total by 100 will give you a percentage to accurately describe the reach of your social media campaigns.
For example, (200 new followers/1000 existing followers) x100 = 20%. Meaning, your social media post has a 20% reach to your total target audience.
Alternatively, you can opt to use specialized tools to track your social media reach for you. Hootsuite, Keyhole, and Brand24 are three popular examples that automatically generate reach reports. You can use this data to see which of your campaigns are the most successful.
Start Engaging Your Community Today!
There are many ways to engage members on social media to help you stand out from boring corporate brands. From replying to comments to starting challenges on your page, two-way conversations can make a massive difference to your business model.
Glue Up community management software builds a private community that is solely dedicated to your members. Get a demo to learn how this exclusive social media platform can maximize engagement, provide peer-to-peer networking opportunities, and enhance members' trust.
Author Bio: Uday Tank is an astute business enthusiast with more than eight years of experience helping businesses reach their full potential. He is the founder and CEO at Rankwisely, providing invaluable support & services for businesses to leverage SEO, content marketing, keyword research, and Link Building to 25x their marketing ROI.
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