For your efforts to have quantifiable results, they need to focus on social media engagement by paying attention your target audience first.

Without engaging people on social media, you won’t be able to send social traffic to your site and you won’t be able to drive much conversion. So no matter what your end goal is, boosting your social engagement should be a top priority.

This can be particularly challenging, especially for B2B brands as they also have to balance maintaining a professional image as well. As such, it’s no surprise that most of the highly-engaging brands you see on social media today are consumer brands. That’s not to say that it’s entirely impossible for B2B companies to build a highly engaging social brand.

Check out these five effective tips to help you boost your social media engagement:

1. Publish content that intrigues your audience

Engaging your target audience requires publishing content that they want to engage with in the first place. What kind of topics do they find interesting? What value do they want to derive out of your posts? Do they want to learn some intriguing facts or do they want to learn how to do something? Perhaps they want to gain valuable insights or tips from industry leaders and influential personalities.

In addition, what kind of content format seems to attract the most attention from them? Perhaps you see a high amount of engagement in your live broadcasts, for instance. Consider all of this and come up with a social content strategy that prioritizes on the needs and preferences of your target audience.

You could look at your social content performance data to understand what works for your brand.  LinkedIn, for instance, will provide you with different performance metrics for your updates such as impressions, views, clicks, CTR, reactions, comments, shares, and engagement rate. This should give you a fair idea of which posts seem to get the most engagement and what makes them successful.

Additionally, you could even ask your followers directly through polls and posts. This will paint an even clearer picture of their preferences and expectations rather than just deriving plausible conclusions based on data.

Pro Tip: Make the most of the Metigy AI to discover your best-performing content and get content suggestions based on what works for the competition.

2. Get your social media engagement timing right

Limited organic reach is one of the biggest challenges to boosting your social engagement as you need people to see your posts first in order to engage with them. With billions of active social media users, people create millions of posts every day. In fact, Twitter sees about 500 million tweets every day. So there’s a good chance your post will get buried among the sea of posts from other users.

This makes it crucial to publish your posts at a time when your followers are most likely to see them if you’re going to boost your social engagement. Although several studies have tried to narrow down on the best time to post on different social media platforms, the findings aren’t universally applicable. The best time to post may vary based on your geographic location, industry, target demographic, and more.

So ideally, you should look at your content performance data to find out which timing works best for you specifically. Perhaps you might find that certain posts that go out during a certain time of day consistently drive higher engagement than your other posts. This will help you figure out when to schedule your posts to get a more impressive social engagement.

Pro Tip: Use the Publishing Insights from Metigy to find out which dates and times work best for you. This tool will also give you recommendations on posting frequency, ideal social networks, and more.

3. Let visuals dominate your content strategy

If you’re a regular social media user, you’ll know how much more attractive images and videos are when you scroll through your feed. They make you want to stop and engage with the post. In fact, Buffer found that tweets with images got 89% more favourites, 150% more retweets, and 18% more clicks than those without.

So it’s crucial that you make the most of visuals in your social content strategy if you want to boost your engagement rate. There are plenty of ways to implement visuals into your social posts. For instance, you could post original graphics with helpful information. See how Mailchimp uses an original graphic to promote their live workshop in the following tweet.

You could also share industry-relevant memes and GIFs to keep things interesting. And don’t forget the occasional videos to liven up your feed and boost your social engagement. In addition, make sure every link you share either has a thumbnail or an accompanying image.

4. Don’t hold back on your responses

Engagement is a two-way street. You can’t expect your audience to keep engaging with your posts if you don’t engage back. So don’t be afraid to respond to comments and questions on your social media posts to let people know that you’re listening and that you care. You could even respond to any posts that tag or mention you to continue a dialogue around your business.

Even just a simple response thanking your customers or acknowledging their positive feedback could work wonders to make people feel heard. This then opens up an opportunity for future engagement. 

5. Put your customers in the spotlight

Social media grants you the perfect platform to show your appreciation for your customers. Since it opens up a direct line of communication between brands and consumers, it’s also an excellent place to give your customers a much-deserved shoutout. This is a great way to show how much you value their business and make them feel like a part of your community.

You could share their stories and experiences through photos and videos, for instance. You could also share reviews and testimonials using original graphics. Take, for example, how CoSchedule shared a customer quote through the Instagram post below. Some companies may also repost user-generated content like photos and tweets from their customers.

Boosting your social media engagement: Wrap up

It’s not that challenging to build an engaging social strategy if you put social engagement at the centre. The main idea is to take a customer-first approach and work towards understanding them better so that you can find out what makes them tick. This will help you shape your entire social strategy and boost your overall social media engagement.

What methods are you using to boost your social media engagement? Let us know in the comments.