Engagement is one of the most important metrics that a business needs to concern themselves with. If you feel like your engagement is down, there are several things you can do to bring it up again. Let’s take a look at why engagement is important for businesses, and what you can do to improve yours.

What is Engagement?

Engagement is the metric of how much customers interact with your brand. It can most often be seen on social media. A brand with a high level of engagement will always receive a lot of likes and comments on their social media. If a brand has poor engagement, they might have a lot of followers but very few likes or comments.

Why is engagement important? It is a clear indication of whether or not your audience is paying attention to what you are posting. If you are simply pushing out content with no regards to how it might be being received, there is a high chance that it will completely miss the mark. If you are not posting content that people are going to be interested in, you are going to lose followers and therefore leads and potential sales for your business.

So, what does good engagement look like? It might be much lower than you think. Many experts agree that a good level of social media engagement stands at around 1-5%. Though this might not seem like much, if you have an account with thousands of followers then 5% of that might be quite a big audience. If you see accounts with higher levels of engagement, there is a chance that they might be buying their likes – a practice you should always avoid.

With this established, what can you do to increase your engagement? Let’s take a closer look at some of the practices that you can follow to improve yours.

Start with an Analysis

You need to know where you are starting from. It is no good to jump in and start making changes without knowing what actually needs to be done. There are so many small changes that need to be made, but you also need to know which ones are going to prove to be the most effective.

Take a look at metrics like your current followers, and other important stats like your average number of shares and comments. Keep track of this as you make changes throughout your changes. You should be able to clearly see what is working for you, and what requires a little more work. To enhance customer engagement, consider integrating a customer engagement app into your strategy. This app can provide valuable insights and analytics, allowing you to track customer interactions, gather feedback, and tailor your approach accordingly. By leveraging the data collected from the app, you can identify trends, optimize your content, and create personalized experiences that resonate with your audience.

Know What Your Audience Expects

To be able to get good levels of engagement, you need to be aware of what your customers want to see from you as a brand. If you try to just push out content with little focus or idea of what you want to see in return, it is only going to create a serious miscommunication between your brand and what your audience might expect to see.

Therefore, you need to make sure that you know your audience inside and out. Try to establish the demographics of your main audience, and then try to work out what is likely to resonate with them. Everything from the tone and style of language to the type of content that you actually create will be dictated by this target audience. You might also find that there are certain social media sites that will prove better for you to target than others. If you want good engagement from your followers, you need to create content that is going to suit them. It is really that simple.

Create Valuable Content

When you are thinking about the type of content that you want to create, it will be far too easy for you to just generate a ton of content that may or may not be of any value to your audience. You should, however, always aim for quality over quantity. Pushing out endless pieces of content with no plan or idea about how you are going to link it back to what your audience might want is always going to prove to be a fruitless endeavour.

Instead, you should try to think up some interesting ideas and leads that could suit your business. For example, have you considered direct mail marketing? If you collect your customers’ addresses as part of the information shared about them, this could be a fantastic way for you create eye-catching content that you can be certain they will want to interact with. This article on direct mail marketing ideas will hopefully give you some ideas on where you can start, and with it you should be able to create some amazing marketing that can lead to further engagement.

Engage with Current Pop Culture

Though some might see it as jumping on the bandwagon, reacting to current pop culture can be a fantastic way for you to build some engagement. Your audience can often see this as a bit of fun, and you should be able to instantly build some connections with them.

There are some events that you can always mention – such as the holidays or major seasonal sporting events – but you should also keep your eyes peeled for current events that you could offer some perspective on. Remember the media frenzy that took over surrounding “The Dress”, or popular TV shows like Tiger King? By offering your own perspective on something amusing that is gaining traction, you can pick up some great engagement from your own followers, plus interest from some new parties too.

Make Sure Your Response Times are Low

The goal for every business is to be seen as trustworthy and friendly, and a key way to do this is actually to try to keep your response times to messages as low as possible. When you first post something to social media, it can be a good idea to hang around the page for the first half-hour or so. This will allow you to address any major concerns that might be raised initially.

If your DMs are open for customers to get in touch with, you should try to respond to them as quickly as possible. The same can be said if you also have an email address through which your customers can get in touch. Try to get back to customers within two working days, if possible.

When customers are left hanging, they can often become frustrated and are more likely to walk away. If you can instead fulfil their enquiry quickly, you should be able to keep them happy and hopefully entice them to engage with your brand further. Maintaining a good rapport is key.

Always Adjust

Building engagement is not a one-off project. You need to make sure that you are pulling out as many stops as you can to ensure that your business is attracting the engagement it needs to succeed. This might require you to make changes to your content strategy fairly often, but it will be worth it in the long run if you are able to continuously build a good level of engagement for your business. Analyse where yours currently stands, and come up with some strategies to drive improvement now.