Likes, comments, and shares on social media have a few benefits. For one thing, they help you understand what messaging and business decisions go over well with your audience and which ones don’t. For another, they can trigger the algorithms that social media platforms use to decide which posts to promote, resulting in increased visibility, more followers, etc.
Ways to increase audience engagement
You can generate more likes, comments, and shares on social media by:
- Choosing engaging topics. And using conversational language to encourage discussions.
- Being active and responsive on your company accounts. This can get people excited about the opportunity to interact with you directly and encourage them to engage.
- Tagging other brands or doing influencer marketing campaigns. That way, your content is cross-promoted by people and brands with credibility and the ability to expose you to a wider audience.
- Doing contests, giveaways, and user-generated content campaigns. For example, you could require followers to tag a few friends to enter a giveaway or tag you in a photo of themselves talking about how they use your product.
How to measure engagement
You’ll want to analyze:
- Likes, shares, and comments per post. You need to understand what content works best and what flops so that you can post more of the right things in the future.
- Brand mentions. Does your audience think you’re worth talking about? If so, and the conversations are positive, that’s a good sign.
- Your engagement rate. If you don’t know what percentage of your audience typically engages with your content, how can you improve that metric?
To find this info, you can check the built-in analytics features in whatever social media site you’re using or you can pull all of your data into a single dashboard using a social media management tool.
As you work to increase engagement, make sure you adhere to the community guidelines for each social site. Not doing so may result in your account being shadowbanned, which severely limits engagement. Learn more about what a shadow ban is here.
