5 Best Practices For Your Social Media Engagement Strategy

Social media is a powerful tool for businesses of all sizes. It can help you connect with customers and build relationships that could lead to new business.

However, social media engagement can often leave people scratching their heads. It all starts with a little planning and foundation work.

In this Tips Tuesday session, we are exploring 5 best practices to help you improve your social media engagement strategy and see better results.

5 Best Social Media Engagement Strategies

1. Identify Your Target Audience.These are your people, the ones most likely to have an interest and want to purchase your product or service. They are the group of people who we should connect with on social media.Our target audience may be dictated by age, gender, location, interests and a myriad of other factors. It might be worth doing competitor research and seeing where our audience is hanging out. This helps us look at what content they are putting out and learn what we can for our own engagement strategy as well.
2. Choose the Right Platforms.Make sure to choose the right social platforms where your audience is hanging out. Avoid the bias of choosing the platform based on your own preference, but base it on the platform where your audience is engaging.One of the best ways to identify this is to look at statistics and demographics. How many active users are on that platform? Facebook for example has 7.9 billion users, but is your audience hanging out on Facebook? Maybe they prefer short-form video content on Tiktok or long-form video content on Youtube.It is also important not to bring out all the platforms all at once. That is only going to overwhelm you. Give your social channels time to grow organically. Try to implement one platform at a time and see how your people respond and connect with the content that you are putting out.
3. Create Engaging Content.As enticing as it is to push our products, it will turn our audience off and turn their backs on us. You need to create engaging content that they can relate to. Create a mix of content that’s going to have some discussion points or educational content that’s going to teach them how to use your product.You need to be able to inspire them through the content you are putting out. And if you’re struggling with some inspiration, you can use the Inspire Engage Connect – Social Media Inspiration Deck to give you some quick ideas.You can create a series of tips on Canva and use a program like MeetEdgar to automate these questions and discussions so that you can engage through your channels regularly.
4. Use Relevant Hashtags.Hashtags link content together and they categorize similar topics through a hash # before a word or phrase so that content related to that topic is easily seen.Create a hashtag that is relevant to your business and you can start using it in your messages. You can use tools like DisplayPurposes and Hashtagify to help with your hashtag research.There’s a webinar called Behind the Hashtags on Webinars On Demand if you want to learn and understand hashtags in more detail.
5. Analyse and Optimize Your Efforts.We need to analyse and optimise our content as we’re delivering it. This helps us identify which strategies are working or not working for us. This also helps us focus our best efforts on the strategies that do work because we only have limited resources within our reach.There are tools that can help you optimise the delivery of your content like MeetEdgar to ensure you’re putting out engaging content regularly. And it helps us change the categories and content that we are putting out based on the insights and results that we get from the platform.

So there you have it, my 5 best practices for social media engagement. In the world of social media, things often change. Social media marketing is a rushing river. Platform updates and algorithm changes happen very often, but these 5 best practices for social media engagement are staples no matter what platform you use.

And if you still need more help on your strategy you can book a call with me and we can chat more about how we can start or improve your social media engagement.

Highlights

[0:00] Introduction
[1:30] Five best practices for better engagement strategy
[1:45] Identify your target audience
[3:19] Choose the right social platforms
[4:55] Create engaging content
[8:00] Look at your hashtags
[9:00] Analyse and optimise your efforts
[10:30] Recap