Seven Tips to Increase Your Brand’s Community Engagement

Do you engage with your audiences on social media? No, we don’t mean posting to your social media feeds, we mean actually interacting on them! Now more than ever, people expect businesses to respond on social media and your social media platforms can become one of your greatest customer service tools! Additionally, community engagement allows your company to listen to and engage directly and transparently with your audiences, build personal, long-term relationships, and establish an authentic brand voice among many other benefits.

Looking for ways to increase your community engagement? Look no further! We’ve gathered some of our favorite, tried and true tips to take your brand’s social media engagement to the next level.

1.  Include Relevant Hashtags on Your Posts – and Engage with Them! Hashtags make your content searchable, which therefore extends your post’s potential reach by attaching it to a category. Engaging with hashtags that are relevant to your products or services and industry can help increase brand awareness and establish your company as a thought leader within your industry. For example, if your company is in the education industry, a popular industry hashtag such as #edchat would be beneficial to include on your posts and engage with.
2. Join Groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. Joining groups that are applicable to your products or services and industry can aid in getting your messaging in front of the right audiences. Say your company works in the human resource industry, joining groups that are centered around human resource discussions or include human resource professionals gives your company the opportunity to directly engage with your target audience, as well as emphasize your position as a thought leader in the industry.
3. Take Advantage of Each Platform’s Capabilities. From Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn Stories to Instagram Reels and IGTV, it’s important to make use of each social media platform’s content offerings. To keep followers engaged and ensure you’re staying in the good graces of any given algorithm, experiment with different types of content. In other words, social media algorithms tend to reward accounts that post on a frequent basis as well as use a variety of content mediums.
4. Tag Other Accounts in Your Posts. Tagging other accounts allows you to capture more reach. For example, if you collaborate with another company on a project, make sure to tag them so their fans and followers can associate you with a brand they already know and love and interact with your content. If you’re mentioning another business, brand or customer, make sure you tag their account accordingly!
5. Ask Questions and Encourage Comments from Your Audience. Question-based posts are an easy way to encourage interactions and connect with your audience. Social media platforms give priority to content with more likes, comments, saves, and shares. The more engagement a piece of content receives, the more likely it is to be favored by the platform’s algorithm.
6. Optimize Your Post Timing.  Timing is a big factor in determining how much engagement your content receives. For example, posting when your audiences are more likely to be active means that your posts are more likely to be seen and engaged with. Thankfully, there are many third-party software tools such as Sprout Social, AgoraPulse, and Later that gather data on your audience’s activity and inform you of optimal posting times.
7. Analyze Your Social Media Performance. Is there a piece of content that your audience seemed to favor? How about a piece of content that didn’t receive engagement? It’s important to analyze your social media performance on at least a monthly basis to capture insight on your audience’s preferences.

Don’t have time to engage on your social media platforms or need more professional help? Get in touch with the experts at Seventh Scout and find out how we can improve your social media strategy and maximize your content to reach and engage with the right audiences for your business.