Over the past few years, social media has gained a lot of popularity. It’s where most people spend their time and has become part of their daily lives. People are believed to mainly use social media to connect with friends, relatives, and even strangers. This has been made easier with the invention of smartphones and other portable devices. As a result, most everyday tasks, including shopping, happen online.
As an entrepreneur who wants to win online customers, social media engagement is an important aspect to consider when building your online shop. While most entrepreneurs want to have many online followers, they often fail to increase their social engagement. If you have a platform to help you engage with your customers, you can easily convert them from fans into customers.
This article will explain some changes you could consider to improve your social engagement, increasing sales, and attracting positive reviews. But before that, you need to understand what social engagement is.
What Is Social Engagement
Social engagement is a strategy to measure how online users interact with your social media accounts and content. It measures the public likes, comments, shares, re-tweets, replies, clicks, etc., across your different social media platforms.
Different popular online social media platforms have their own ways for users to express their views regarding your content and branding. For instance, you need to check the number of likes in a single post, how many followers your business’ social media account gained in a day, and the like.
While likes and shares will tell you about the popularity of your content, the number of follows can indicate that users want to see more and more of your posts, and you can easily turn them into buying customers.
That said, to increase sales you first need to improve the level of your social engagement. You can achieve this by making some changes to your online store. Some of these changes are explained here below.
Start Posting Your Content At The Right Time
Note that social media users go online during specific times of the day. You need to find out what time your target audience likes to be online for you could potentially be losing out on engagement. If you post your content when your audience is offline, you miss out on connecting with them. Make sure to post your content when your followers are online so that they can see what you post and possibly like, comment and share.
Followers can be online at different times depending on time zones, target demographics, social media channels you’re using, among other factors. Make sure to do your research to find out which time will work best for you on different social media platforms.
Create Engaging Visuals
Using relevant images on social media platforms allows your posts to gain more attention thus increasing engagement. This goes without saying that you need to include relevant images in your posts if you want to improve your social engagement.
These images could be memes, graphics, or photos. Using them helps to attract the attention of the audience, communicate important information, and increase engagement. Again, when you consistently include images in your posts, your business will have more staying power in the market.
Review Your Account Insights
Ensure your employees know how to communicate with your clients and can interpret analytical data. This will help you understand what’s working and what isn’t working in your business so that you don’t end up focusing your time and energy on the wrong audience.
Don’t assume that you already know your audience needs but instead, take time to regularly review your data to see which segments of your market have evolved so that you can adapt a marketing strategy that your audience responds to best. This means that when creating future content, you’ll be able to communicate with your audience in a more engaging way.
Measuring audience engagement largely depends on the social platform you’re using and the industry you’re in. Likes, re-share, and comments are some ways you can use to measure your social engagement. You can also check to find how long do your clients stay on your posts on average. And finally, a large percentage of returning users is a positive sign of a well-engaged audience.
Use Trending Hashtags
In recent years, trending hashtags have become very popular since they are centers of recent news of the world. You must have heard most people asking, ‘what is currently trending?’ A hashtag is a label used to index specific keywords or topics on social media. It makes it easier to find information or posts that contain certain content. A hashtag is created by including the label “#” before a word without spacing.
Hashtags can play an important role when it comes to the marketing of your products. It makes your posts across social media platforms easily be discovered. Including a trending hashtag in your posts helps expand your reach, and this increases your post engagement.
When you see a trend relating to your niche, post something relating to it using a new hashtag. Using trending hashtags is believed to be one of the best ways to engage people who aren’t on your follower’s list. When you use trending hashtags in your social media posts, you’ll be increasing the chances of online users to find you and your content.
Do Live Events For Your Followers
With the introduction of live features on social platforms, most businesses have opted to use this strategy to increase their social media engagement. Going live allows you to engage with your followers on a real-time basis. You can use this option to launch an event, entertain your audience, or update your fans about your business which you can do once or twice a week.
Before you do a live stream, make sure you inform your followers so that they can be ready for your live event. People can engage with your live video by liking, commenting, and sharing. It’ll also allow you to respond to your audience’s queries in real-time, and this will create a long-term relationship.
Takeaway
Improving your social engagement can help increase your sales. Even if your aim isn’t to have a large following, improving your engagement is vital to the business identity, allowing you to engage more with your customers. Improving your social engagement isn’t hard. Post your content at the right time, use trending hashtags, use high-quality images and videos, and go live. By doing all these, you’ll be taking your business to another level.
