6 Tactics To Boost Social Media Engagement
Repeat after us: social media engagement is not a vanity metric!
Yes, a “like” on Instagram or a save on TikTok is not providing you with an immediate ROI. However, your social media engagement rate is an essential piece of your customer retention efforts. This metric strongly correlates to customer loyalty and staying top of mind to encourage repeat purchases.
Here are the top three reasons engagement rates matter:
When you're paying very close attention to what's driving high engagement, you are getting in the mind of your customers.
You learn what they like, what they don't care about and can gain some very valuable insights to support everything from product development, to more efficient content creation, to ideas for in-person marketing campaigns or collabs.
The more you engage with your audience and vice versa, the more you show up in people's feeds - staying top of mind and generating consideration.
Additionally, the more people are thinking of you, the more likely they are to bring their friends or family into the conversation by tagging, DM-ing them or saving your content to share with someone later.
Maybe most importantly, engagement rate has a direct effect on e-commerce efforts and plays a critical role in the path-to-purchase.
In-platform shopping is going to explode these next two years, and your engagement rate impacts your reach and discoverability, which when combined with tagged products, can lead to direct, in-app sales. Additionally, it can impact off-platform sales by increasing your website visits. When you work backwards from your conversation rate, you can get a sense of how many people need to see your content in order to drive a website visit, and how many website visits to drive a conversion.
With Instagram’s average engagement rate holding steady at about .7%, if you’re seeing an average engagement rate below that (or even close to it) you should probably consider tactics to boost it. Here are our top five tactics:
Conduct a “Relatability" Brain Dump”
Photo credit: Recess
Do a deep dive into all of your audience data - pull from your social channels, email list, Google Analytics, website analytics and collect as many customer insights as you can from the data. Use Instagram’s social tools like polls, questions and quizzes to gather more specific data. Review high and low performing content, identifying themes. From there, make a list of things you know about your audience (i.e. they love Gilmore Girls, they love value shopping, they are mothers to young children, etc.) Don't forget to ask your employees across the company too - you never know what someone knows (especially your customer service team!) Take this information and use it to brainstorm relatable content for your community.
2. Look for Opportunities to Start Two-Way Conversations
Photo credit: Graza
Identity opportunities to take customer service efforts to social. Think beyond just answering questions about orders. This example from Graza Olive Oil shows how you can provide a human response to any sort of QA issue or an FAQ. This video addressing their caps being too tight sparked lots of positive feedback from their audience, upping their engagement rate.
3. Incorporate Fun Controversy
Photo credit: Databutmakeitfashion
What is a hot button (yet PLAYFUL) issue you can put to your audience? Brands like ASOS and Graza capitalized on the “controversial” issues of Jorts and whether or not you can fry in olive oil to spark light-hearted but intense debate over these issues. Brainstorm which issues might be relevant to your community and start letting the opinions fly in the comments section!
4. Provide Value
You've likely heard this before, but that's because it's possibly the most important thing you can do to succeed in modern marketing - and not just on social media.
Photo credits: Clare V, Homemade Social, Brightland
The value you provide doesn't necessarily have to be non-product focused. Clare V recorded a low-budget video to answer a frequently asked customer question: what is the size difference between two bags. They then monitored the post to quickly and conversationally reply to the additional questions this prompted, and linked to their IG shop to push followers down the path to purchase.
This social media agency knows that influencer and creator rates are a confusing topic among their audience, so they shared some expertise. They used the CTA "save this post" to generate engagement actions and it did just that.
Brightland olive oil shares a beautiful monthly product guide with their audience of home cooks every month, and the love they receive from it is amazing. It provides inspiration and knowledge to their followers, and generates saves and shares.
5. Leverage Teasers
Photo credit: Graza
If you have a product launch, a brand collaboration, a giveaway, a new product category or a big business announcement, tease it on your social media channels in a fun and playful way. It doesn't matter if your audience knows exactly what you’re teasing - your followers can’t resist speculating and tagging friends to be the first to know. Pro tip: use this as an email sign up tool! Email subscribers find out first!
6. Collaborations and Partnerships
Photo credit: Recess & Great Jones
Utilizing the collab post feature (where you can co-author a post with another account) instantly gets you in front of a whole new audience. Through social listening and consumer research, identify brands that your audiences love and develop a unique partnership with them. It can be a product collaboration, a joint giveaway or just a fun piece of content that features your products like this Masetta + Natalie's post.
Bonus Tip: Adapt a TikTok Mindset
What happens on TikTok does NOT stay on TikTok. The impact this platform has on our culture and what happens on other platforms can’t be underestimated. The characteristics of TikTok reflect the modern consumers’ desire to have a more human connection to the brands they purchase from. Ensure that your content on other platforms takes a cue from TikTok - taking followers behind-the-scenes, using vulnerability, unbranded content and talking off the cuff to the camera.
Photo credit: ABC News
One of the most common mistakes we see growing brands make is over-investing in customer acquisition and underinvesting in customer retention efforts. That’s what sets our agency apart. Retention is a huge part of our unique approach to marketing and we incorporate it into all aspects of our marketing strategies and channel management. If you are looking for ways to keep your existing customers happy and build loyalty from the ground up – let’s chat.
To learn more, watch the full webinar with Kaitlin Cleary, our Co-Founder & Director of Insights & Brand Strategy, on how to boost your social media engagement here.