Updated April 2022
- Overview
- Why Social Media Engagement Is Important
- Inbound vs. Outbound Engagement
- General Social Media Best Practices
Overview
Social Media is not "social" without engagement! Engagement is one of the ways brands can measure the connections they’re making and how people are interacting with their content. The term covers a broad spectrum of actions including likes, shares, comments, DMs, clicks, mentions, saves, and more!
While engagement is considered a “vanity metric” that can help with a brand’s overall social proof, it does not necessarily translate to sales. Instead, it should be seen as a metric that shows if your content is actually resonating with your audience, which could lead to an increase in conversions.
Why Social Media Engagement Is Important
Not only is it important to evaluate how your content resonates with your audience, but it’s an important signal that many social platforms’ algorithms take into consideration when deciding what posts to prioritize.
In 2022, Instagram released that its algorithm takes 5 key interactions into consideration when ranking posts to be shown higher on feeds and the explore tab: time spent on the post, likes, comments, saves, and taps through the post to a profile – all forms of engagement.
But it’s important to remember that engagement cannot be one-sided. When customers engage with a brand, they expect the brand to engage back in some way. Whether they’re commenting with a question, DM-ing with a support inquiry, or simply just showing their support for your brand, they want to, at a minimum, be acknowledged. While it may be nerve-wracking to publicly respond, data shows that globally 54% of people have a more favorable view of brands that respond to questions or complaints on social media.
Inbound vs. Outbound Engagement
There are two different types of engagement to perform on social media – inbound and outbound.
Inbound engagement is the engagement on your profiles with your audience, including responses to DMs, comments, and reviews. The purpose of inbound engagement is to connect with your current audience and curate meaningful interactions with them.
Outbound engagement is engagement you perform outside of what's on your page, like engaging with other brands, influencers, and people not following you. The purpose of outbound engagement is to get your brand in places it wouldn’t otherwise be, which can lead to larger brand awareness and an increase in following and inbound engagement.
Both types of engagement are important to take into consideration when thinking of your overall engagement strategy on social media.
General Social Media Best Practices
- Respond to your customers – about 51.7% of consumers expect brands to respond to their negative reviews within seven days.
- Respond to their positive comments, too. Give them thanks for their support, ask them an engaging question, shoot them a fun emoji or GIF, etc.
- Basically, respond to everything! Even if someone only comments an emoji or a single word, responding to them shows that you care and you’ll differentiate yourself from other brands.
- Don’t take the easy route and hide or delete a negative comment. Answer these honestly and transparently. This shows other potential customers that you care about making things right and don’t shy away from negative comments. Only hide or delete comments that are irrelevant, annoying, or spammy.
- Make your content engaging from the get-go – ask questions, share news, etc.!
- Utilize a software with an engagement tool, like Sprout Social, to easily access and respond to all social comments and DM’s in one place.
- Keep a consistent brand voice across all platforms when engaging. Be authentic, speak to your customers with empathy, and keep your purpose in mind – is your purpose to engage, educate, sell, or entertain?
- If you create and use canned responses, make sure to make tweaks every couple responses so it doesn’t look as though you’re just copying and pasting the same answer over and over again.
- Know your algorithms and remember that each social platform measures engagement differently.
- Avoid overtly "sales-y" engagement. You want to make connections with the people you’re engaging with, not sell them. Once you make those connections, it will be easier to talk about what you do and drive potential conversions, but avoid this type of engagement when you are just starting relationships with your audience.
Platform-Specific Best Practices
Recommended Types Of Engagement: Both inbound and outbound.
Best Practices and Processes:
- First, start off by building a curated audience that is most relevant to your brand:
- Follow industry influencers, including relevant (but not competing) brands and influencers. An example could be following a large pet adoption rescue as a pet grooming business to get in front of customers who adopt a pet that will need to be groomed regularly.
- Follow your target audience. Check out the people who follow the same hashtags you follow and the same pages you follow. Look for people who are posting with geotags around your local community and follow them.
- Follow hashtags relevant to your brand and to your audience. This will make it easier to identify what posts you should comment on and what other pages you should follow.
- Spend time on a consistent basis (every day, every other day, etc.) engaging with your newly curated feed of influencers, target audience members, and relevant hashtags.
- Like the posts that you find relevant or interesting in your feed.
- Comment with engaging questions, insight, etc. You want your comment to be brief enough that people won’t skip past it, but interesting enough that people will actually respond to it.
- Don’t comment or like every post posted by a specific individual. This can come off spammy, so make sure you’re choosing the posts that are most relevant to you.
- Spend your time engaging with others for 15 - 30 minutes before you publish a post. This can help to boost your results when people choose to engage back with you.
- Try Gary Vaynerchuck’s $1.80 Instagram Engagement Strategy. Put simply, you should leave your two cents on nine trending IG posts for ten different relevant hashtags to your brand every single day.
- Use IG geotags/locations to engage with people or businesses in your area. For example, if you are a pet grooming business, you may look at dog park locations to find pet owners who could become potential customers.
- Engage with your competitor’s audience - these people could be potential followers or customers for you! Follow people who engage with your competitors, engage with their content, and build some brand awareness with them! This can also be done with brands that aren’t competition, but are similar to you.
- Don’t miss IG Stories! Tap through the IG stories you’re able to view and react to or comment on stories that you find relevant or interesting. If someone responds to your message, make sure to keep the conversation going!
- You can also create Stories that encourage engagement. Use the stickers feature to incorporate Questions, Polls, Quizzes, and more.
- Additionally, don’t forget about Reels! You can tap on the icon in the bottom-middle of your app to see Reels that are recommended for you. You can like, comment, and share Reels, but there is one unique feature to interact: Remix.
- When you select “Remix This Reel,” IG will prompt you to record a video side-by-side with the video you’ve chosen to remix. These types of videos are great to use to show your reaction to what is happening in the original video.
Recommended Types Of Engagement: Mostly inbound with occasional outbound.
Best Practices and Processes:
- Respond to comments within four hours for the best result. People expect prompt responses, so if a reply comes after the first four hours, the odds of additional engagement with the follower decreases.
- Set up a chatbot! If you know you might not be able to respond to direct messages in a timely manner, you can utilize a chatbot to help provide your customers with the immediate information they need or how to reach you more immediately, if needed.
- Utilize your page’s inbox to see your Facebook page’s messages and comments, plus your connected Instagram account’s comments and messages! This is a quick and easy way to ensure your inbound engagement is completed.
- For outbound engagement, you should utilize your page’s News Feed to curate a feed full of people, other businesses, and industry influencers to easily engage with. You can set this up using the Manage Page section on the left-hand side of your page.
- You can also perform outbound engagement by visiting other people’s or brand’s pages directly. Just make sure when liking/commenting that you select your business page to interact as.
- Join Facebook Groups as your business and respond to or create topics in the Groups. Again, you’ll want to make sure you select your business page when joining Groups. Some Groups don’t allow business pages to join and some have strict policies, so make sure to take a look at a Group’s About section before joining.
Recommended Types Of Engagement: Inbound and outbound.
Best Practices and Processes:
- Utilize a visual element to get more engagement on your Tweets. This will help you get some replies that you can continue conversations with.
- Retweet Tweets that are directed towards you that are relevant to your brand and your audience. This could be someone Tweeting about their experience with you or giving you some kind of kudos.
- Respond when someone Tweets to you. You can reply directly as a thread or Retweet with a response.
- Retweet other industry influencers' Tweets. Twitter is a newsworthy platform, so if there is an influencer who shares information that your audience may find relevant, Retweet it!
- Check the Trending Topics on Twitter often and engage with or start conversations related to these trending topics. Only engage with the topics that are most relevant to your brand.
- Utilize Twitter Polls to ask engaging questions to your audience that allows them to share their opinions with you. This shows that you value their thoughts and gives you insights into content you can create that will resonate with them.
- Utilize hashtags and engage with Tweets in a hashtag that is relevant to your brand.
- Keep your Tweets and responses short and concise. Remember that Twitter has a 280 character limit. If you’re sharing a link, shorten it first.
Recommended Types Of Engagement: Inbound and outbound.
Best Practices and Processes:
- LinkedIn is a connection-first platform, so connect with other brands and influencers by engaging with them! On your page, select Content Suggestions to be suggested content relevant to your brand.
- LinkedIn doesn’t have a seamless way to engage as your business page versus your personal profile, so check out this workaround to engage as your business.
- Invite your personal connections to follow your business page on the right-hand side of your page. Note that there is an “invite credit” you are given each month, so make sure to utilize those!
Recommended Types Of Engagement: Mostly inbound with occasional outbound.
Best Practices and Processes:
- Follow other brands and influencers that post content valuable to you and your customers. By doing this, you are curating your home feed to provide you with a library of Pins to regularly engage with and share with your followers.
- You can interact with other Pinterest users in a variety of ways:
- Likes: You can like and save Pins from other brands, influencers, etc.
- Comments: You can also comment on Pins. Click into the Pin you want to engage with and make valuable comments such as how you or others can utilize the Pin information, other ideas the Pin may bring up, etc.
- Messages: You can send direct messages to other users on Pinterest or utilize the messaging feature to send Pins to those not on Pinterest, too!
- Tag Users: You can tag other Pinterest users in the description of your Pin or in the comments
- Group Boards: Create a group board where you and other influencers can collaborate and share content.
- Stories: When you visit the Pinterest mobile app, you can view Story Pins at the very top of your home feed. Similar to other Pins, you can like, comment, save, and send these Pins.
TikTok
Recommended Types Of Engagement: Inbound and outbound.
Best Practices and Processes:
- There are two types of feeds in TikTok: your For You feed and your Following feed. In both feeds you are able to quickly like, comment, and share videos.
- Curate your Following feed similar to how you would on Instagram. Follow industry influencers, similar brands, and those who match your target audience.
- TikTok has two unique features for engagement specific to their platform: dueting and stitching.
- In a duet, you’ll record a video side-by-side with another user’s video that continuously plays at the same time. These types of videos are good for reactions.
- In a stitch, you’ll trim the original video you want to respond to and record a new ending. For example, an original video may say “stitch this if you have a crazy story about how you started your business,” in which case you can answer in your stitched video. These types of videos are good for responses to things where you can provide information, answers, thoughts, etc.
- When creating a TikTok, utilize the sticker options you have to encourage engagement from others:
- Utilize the “Polls” sticker where to ask a question and poll users on what their answer is.
- Utilize the “Ask” sticker to ask a question that other users can record responses to.
- Utilize the “Reply” sticker to answer a question that other users have asked.
YouTube
Recommended Types Of Engagement: Mostly inbound with occasional outbound.
Best Practices and Processes:
- YouTube is one of the only platforms without direct messages, but does support comments, likes, and dislikes that you can use to connect with others.
- Subscribe to others’ YouTube channels to build a feed of videos that may be valuable to your brand or your audience.
- You can use the ‘Clip’ feature on YouTube to select clips of others’ videos and share those to your feed with a short description of your thoughts, questions, etc.
- YouTube Shorts, similar to TikTok and Reels, is another option you can use to engage with others. Unlike TikTok and Reels, however, there is no option to Duet or Remix another video to share your reaction or response, so commenting, liking, and sharing is what you can do.
Google My Business
Recommended Types Of Engagement: Inbound.
Best Practices and Processes:
- While GMB is not a platform that supports a lot of engagement, there are a few things you can do:
- Direct messages: In order to accept messages, you must turn on your Chat feature. You can do this by selecting ‘Messages’ from your profile menu. Once turned on, customers can send you messages that you can respond to directly in your GMB profile.
- Reviews: You can reply to your Google reviews directly in your GMB profile. You’ll want to respond to every review, good or bad. Thank customers for their positive feedback or offer resolutions to those sharing negative reviews. Never get defensive or rude in these replies, simply offer your apologies, let the customer know you’d like to make things right, and either reach out to them if you have their contact info or ask them to reach out to you by sharing your contact info.
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