Content engagement is an essential part of growing your business. But what is audience engagement and why is it important? Where does social media engagement fit in your marketing strategy and how do you increase your content engagement? This article will address these questions and other components of content engagement.
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What is Audience Engagement?
Audience engagement will give you brand awareness, develop your brand, build trusted relationships with your customers, and is one of the most effective ways to grow your business.
Here are some tips to creating content that engages your audience:
Know Your Audience
Because we live in such a digital world, it’s easier than ever to know your audience. Social media is a great way to learn about your audience. You can interact with them by finding out what interests them, writing relatable content, answering comments on posts, and showing you truly care about their thoughts and opinions. Your audience will appreciate your genuineness.
Tell a Story
Stories are a great way to tell your audience about your product. The more authentic you are, the better. For example, you can talk about how you started your business or blog. You could also share relatable stories to emotionally reach your audience.
Create Content With Intent
To have high content engagement, you must have a purpose behind your content. Your content will be more appealing to viewers when you know your goals. It’s important to ask yourself why you are creating this content and who are you creating it for. You will have a greater impact on your audience when you’re reaching the right people at the right time.
Lean into Your Strengths
Using your strengths can be beneficial when creating content for your social media accounts like Facebook and Instagram. Use what you’re most comfortable with to attract your audience. If you’re a talented writer, use writing. Or maybe you’d prefer to make videos. You want your followers to be able to relate to your content, so that hopefully they will comment or share the post with friends. Be sure that your content is consistent and makes a good impression on your audience.
Create Valuable Content
Since your audience will be your future customers, you should be sure to add value to your advertising. You want your social media content to keep people coming back and to be engaging enough that people find it worth their time. Your audience will trust you more when you efficiently answer their questions and comments.
What is Social Media Engagement?
Social media engagement is a specific content engagement metric focused only on social media users. Some standard metrics include: likes, comments, shares, saved items, click-throughs, or retweets. Practically, what does social media engagement look like for social media platforms? To better understand this, let’s explore social media engagement KPI’s for Facebook and Instagram. Key performance indicators or KPIs measure how effectively a business is reaching its objectives.
Reach
Reach is the number of accounts that were exposed to a social media post. It measures the users to a type of post, such as an image or video. Reach also measures a user’s exposure to a campaign, page or profile.
On a Facebook post, the reach is shown at the bottom of a post on your business page. Only an administrator or someone logged into the page will be able to view the information. By clicking on “people reached,” more insights will open on that specific post. Also, you can go to Facebook Insights and click on the “posts” tab. When viewing Insights on a desktop you can view all the posts from the page. You can see the reach from organic and paid versions.
On the Instagram app, you will find the reach metric under “Insights.” Then tap on “Accounts Reached.” Instagram gives an Overview of your posts. You can see posts from the past 7 days or change the duration.
Impressions
Impressions are any time a post shows in a user’s feed. The viewer may or may not be required to view the post for an Impression to be recorded.
Facebook only shows impressions for paid promoted posts. It does not show impression metrics for organic posts. On the Instagram app, you will find the impressions metric under Insights. Tap on Accounts Reached and scroll down to Impressions. You will see your impressions for the past 7 days but can change the duration.
Shares/Retweets
A share is when someone shares a post of yours with their own audience. Retweets are Twitter’s version of a share.
You can see the number of shares at the bottom of every Facebook post. Another way to view shares is by going to the insights on your page. When you click on the Posts tab on the left of the screen, you can use the drop-down menu to view “reactions/posts/shares.” Your engagement metrics will be broken down into those three types.
Likes/Reactions/Favorites
Likes, reactions, and favorites are types of one-click engagements users have with a social media post. It’s a simple way to show approval or interest in the post.
Facebook reactions include “like,” “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” “care,” and “angry.” In order to see those metrics, you must be logged into the account that your business page is associated with. You can also view these metrics under Insights > Posts > Reactions/Comments/Shares in the dropdown menu.
Comments/Replies
Comments or replies are responses to an original post from other users and appear under the posts.
Comments and replies on Facebook appear at the bottom of each post. You can also view them in Insights by going to Posts on the left of the screen and then use the dropdown menu to view Comments/Replies. Instagram does not provide any comments metric, but you can click on individual posts and you can view the number of comments for that post.
Optimal Days/Times for Engagement
Not every day or time is the best time to post on social media. You will get the most reach and engagement if you post on the specific days your audience is online. You can use your analytics to see when your audience is most active and post accordingly.
At the top of the Insights on Facebook, there is a graph showing the most active days and times of your audience. On the Instagram app, under Audience, you can see your followers’ most active days and times.
Followers or Audience Demographics
Followers are users that subscribe to your page or profile and its posts. Audience demographics metrics are the age, gender, location, etc. of your audience.
On Facebook, you can view these metrics in Insights under the Followers and People tabs. You can view the total of page followers and the number of followers lost or gained. Under the People tab, you can view your audience by age, gender, locations, etc.
You can view these metrics under Insights on the Instagram app. Navigate to Your Audience to view both Followers and audience demographics.
How to Increase Your Social Media Engagement
Some ways to increase your social media engagement are to analyze your current engagement, set goals, define metrics and understand the components of engaging posts.
Setting goals and defining metrics will help you know what content gets the most engagement and which content you should focus on. You’ll need to know what posts or content people find interesting or engage with the most, and how they are engaging the content via comments, likes, follows, etc.
Understanding audience and social media engagement is key to any marketing strategy. You must know who’s interested in your content so that you can effectively plan and reach the right groups of people at the right time.
FAQ:
- Why is content engagement essential?
- What is audience engagement?
- How do you effectively engage your audience?
- How do you use social media to increase engagement?
- What social media KPIs should you be tracking?
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