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Attention is the most powerful resource on the internet. Capturing the attention of your audiences through engagement is the holy grail of success in modern digital marketing. Some of the most critical metrics in marketing performance such as page views and email opens are all directly related to your audience engagement levels.
In fact, social networks tend to boost content that is engaging instead of content posted by someone with a lot of followers. The number of followers you have has become less and less relevant over the years in terms of organic reach. That’s why an active participation from your audiences is absolutely necessary to achieve your marketing goals. Let’s take a look at eight essential strategies on how you can build audience engagement for your brand.
Why is Audience Engagement on Social Media Important?
Audience engagement is a term that defines how much your audiences interact with your social media posts. On most social platforms, this means likes, comments and shares.
However, social media algorithms take into account a number of different factors including:
- Post opens, clicks on CTA links
- Profile clicks, likes, comments and shares
- Saves (on Instagram), tagging
- Time spent on post, mentions of your page
It’s not just about how many interactions you get but also about the quality of those interactions. This is why it is important to understand your audiences and human psychology when crafting your social media posts. Social media algorithms tend to prioritize posts with high engagement levels. Even if you have a lot of followers, your posts will not be shown to all of them unless your posts are genuinely engaging.
Strategies to Boost Audience Engagement in the Long-Term
Building audience engagement is no easy task. You can spend money on ads to send traffic your way but you need to have a strategy in place to make those people stick around. Here are some ways to boost audience engagement:
1. Use social media the right way
The real reason why people visit social networks like Instagram and Twitter is to connect with other people around the world. They do this by consuming content produced by real people. In fact, 71% of millennials engage with user-generated content daily.
Content from brands and companies, such as offers and initiatives mostly gets ignored and doesn’t get the same level of engagement as user-generated content (UGC). If you want to boost engagement on social media, your content should follow the norms and cultures of the particular platform you’re posting on.
For instance, don’t try to post long corporate-style videos on TikTok – you’ll only be made fun of. Your content should be indistinguishable from what people are already posting on a social media platform. SHEIN, for example, mostly uses user-generated content on its Instagram.
This kind of content gets the most audience engagement on social media. Use this guide to learn how to leverage UGC for your brand.
2. Partner with influencers and content creators
Influencers and content creators are always well-versed in social media trends. They already have a great understanding of the algorithms and are experienced in creating content that engages audiences. Use influencers in your industry to get an instant boost in your credibility when promoting your brand.
In addition, if people find a familiar face in your videos they are much more likely to engage and take action. If you’re looking for influencers or content creators to partner with affordably, use Paysenger. Paysenger is a social marketplace that makes it easy to order content from influencers and content creators. To use it, simply:
- Download the app on iOS or Android (or use the Web version)
- Create an account
- Go to the Creators tab
- Find Creators using Search Filters
- View their Paysenger profiles
- View their portfolio and on-demand content offers
- Place an Order (don’t forget to describe it in detail)
Paysenger really streamlines the process of influencer marketing. On traditional networks such as Instagram, it takes a long time to get the attention of influencers and close a deal with them. Paysenger allows you to immediately get their attention, make payments for their services and to get high-quality content delivered to you.
3. Launch online or offline events
Host or sponsor events to build a closer relationship with your audiences. Events tell people that you care about the community and are willing to offer great value to the market in addition to your products and services. Using events, you also create a memorable experience and people are likely to engage with your content after they’ve been to any of your events.
Red Bull, for example, is known to sponsor extreme sports, art installations and music festivals. By creating events, they have successfully crafted a special community relationship that goes beyond conventional marketing. This approach has enabled them to forge a more profound bond with their audiences.
While you don’t have to climb the same heights as Red Bull, you can use their philosophy in marketing and create something relevant to your industry. You can even do online events. For example, Stephen Ridley – a musician, offers free music training webinars. People sign up to his webinars and this grows the size of his email list and social media following.
4. Offer giveaways
People love gifts! Giveaway posts get very high engagement because people are offered something in return for giving likes and comments. Think about it – if a social media post isn’t giving people any value, why should they react to it? Many ecommerce brands have weekly giveaways to drive traffic on their social networks.
5. Offer rewards and tokens
According to the Social Media Benchmark Report, engagement rates have dropped considerably on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Engagement rate on Facebook is 0.06% and 0.01% on Twitter. Instagram saw the largest drop at the end of 2022, from 1.22% to 0.47%. There’s a great abundance of content on the internet and people are less and less motivated to engage.
Offer incentives in exchange for engagement
While content creators on social media are paid to get more views, there’s no incentive for daily consumers to engage and show their support through likes, comments and shares. By using a social marketplace like Paysenger, you can offer payments to users for giving likes, comments and shares to get an instant boost in engagement.
Paysenger is a social platform that distributes EGO tokens to consumers for giving likes and comments. This allows audiences to participate in the creator economy and earn revenue for their contribution. Engagement on social media is a valuable resource. Paysenger has tokenized this resource so brands can achieve their business goals quickly.
6. Use remarketing
Do you ever go to Instagram or Facebook and get targeted by an ad from a company you just visited on Google? That’s remarketing. You can set it up using Facebook’s Ad Manager. If you feel like people are not taking actions on your site, send them coupons and discounts to help them complete the purchase. People are more likely to engage with your social media posts if they’ve already visited your website or consumed any of your content before.
7. Define your metrics
Before you start putting out content, make sure you are measuring the right social media metrics. Depending on what your goals are, pick metrics that help you benchmark engagement levels on all social media platforms.
- Likes, Comments and Retweets are the most basic metrics to evaluate your engagement levels.
- Engagement rate. Number of interactions divided by impressions. This is a measure of the number of people who engage with your post after seeing it on their news feed.
- Impressions and reach. Posts that have a high engagement rate tend to get pushed upwards by the algorithm.
- Mentions. This is a measure of @mentions in the comments. This is also a great indicator that people find your post interesting.
8. Understand what makes a post engaging
People have low attention spans and they go to social media for a quick shot of dopamine. This is why short-form videos and visually appealing images are the most engaging types of in-feed content.
According to Facebook, you only have 1.7 seconds to grab the attention of your audiences. So make your content short, to-the-point, attention grabbing and easy to digest. Try different types of content on each platform and split test multiple ideas. Keep optimizing for engagement until you find the components that get the best results.
Conclusion
Building strong audience engagement takes time, money and effort. To get the most out of your social media efforts, you must transform your content and invest in influencers, events and giveaways to drive engagement levels.
And since traditional social networks have highly selective algorithms, you’ll have to work with an engagement rate of 0.06-0.5% – even after intense effort. Overcome these barriers by using Paysenger – a modern social platform that uses a tokenized creator economy.
Paysenger rewards content creators and brands for creativity. Content that has potential to be highly engaging rewards not only the creators but also the consumers for giving likes and comments. This is a more decentralized way of “earning” engagement levels on the internet.
Start using Paysenger to boost your engagement levels. Order content from influencers, collaborate with content creators and pay audiences to participate in your events.