What is social media engagement for business? 

Social media engagement refers to measuring what amount of your audience on social media interacts with your content in some way: via likes, shares, or comments. In other words, this metric shows the percentage of users who are interested and involved with your content, ultimately turning into leads and conversions from social platforms. 

To implement your social media strategy right, you need two things: 

1. Understanding of how to measure social media KPIs.
2. Techniques aimed at increasing engagement on social media platforms.

And that’s what we’ll be talking about in this post.

What Social Media KPIs Matter and How Do You Track Them?

For measuring the performance of your social media efforts, you have to answer the following important questions:

• How many leads come from our social media channels?
• How many convert them into customers?
• What type of customers are those conversions – are they big spenders with huge checks or multiple “small” buyers? 
• What is the ROI (Return on Investment) of the brand’s social media marketing efforts?

Here is the deal: before you get leads, you need to have traffic. And traffic from social media means engagement. Thus, engagement in social media plays a crucial role in your overall marketing plan. 

Brands need to track essential social media metrics and KPIs to understand their marketing results and the impact of decisions they make. Types of social media engagement include comments, likes, and shares, but these metrics by themselves are misleading. However, if you combine them with other data, then you’ll have a solid analytics foundation to work with. 

Let’s take a look at the core metrics and KPIs categorized in accordance with the stages of a digital marketing funnel.

Awareness

• Brand awareness
• Audience growth rate
• Post reach
• Potential reach
• Social Share of Voice (SSoV) 

Engagement 

• Applause rate
• Average engagement rate
• Amplification rate
• Virality rate

Conversion

• Click-through Rate (CTR)
• Bounce rate
• Cost-per-click rate (CPC)
• Cost per thousand impressions (CMP)
• Social media conversion rate
• Conversion rate (on the website/landing page)

Customer metrics

• Customer testimonials
• Customer satisfaction score (CSat)
• Net promoter score (NPS)

You choose specific KPIs depending on your social media marketing strategy, so you may want to measure some while discarding the rest. 

But how do you calculate social media engagement rates with all their complicated formulas? Manually? Luckily, no. 

The use of specialized data analytics tools makes your job simple and completely accurate.

3 Tools To Measure Your Social Media Engagement Rate

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a universal tool to use when you need a free but powerful all-rounder that can track your marketing results by various channels, including website, social media pages, referral pages, emails, etc. Utilizing Google Analytics tips can enhance your understanding and utilization of this powerful tool.

Basic tracking works from the get-go as long as you use links with UTM parameters in your campaigns. Delve in deeper with custom reports, and you can track and see results on many combinations of metrics and KPIs of your choice.

You can make your analytics software even more powerful if you use social APIs. If you search for popular APIs by category, you’ll notice that many companies use social APIs because they effortlessly integrate with your social media accounts. 

Take TokApi, for example, which monitors endpoints like Hashtag IDs and the Trending Page. Once you can properly analyze this information, you can use it to create better TikTok content.

2. In-built platform analytics tools 

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social media platforms provide their own analytics that help you easily measure different types of social media engagement metrics. Some of them, including Facebook, even allow creating reports with custom formulas.

3. Google Data Studio

Google Data Studio is not an analytics tool, but if you work with more than two platforms (plus your website, landing pages, CRM, and whatnot), you’d want to have somewhere to bring all of that data together. That’s where Google Data Studio comes in. 

It’s a free tool that lets you take data from many different sources (like Facebook Analytics, your CRM system, Google Analytics, or other places) and arrange it into easy-to-read dashboards and reports. 

Google Data Studio can become a worthy part of your social media engagement strategy because you’ll be able to compare, look at data from different angles, and have a bird’s-eye view of the overall picture. Ultimately, this helps you make informed decisions and not waste efforts.

Now that we clarified what to measure and how to do so, let’s talk about what you can do to increase your engagement rate.

7 Tips And Tricks To Increase Social Media Engagement

I want to share with you seven of my favorite and proven techniques to boost user engagement in social media:

1. Share content that your audience can relate to
2. Create conversations and follow up on trends 
3. Prompt readers to like, share, and comment
4. Show your human side (but remember to keep it speedy)
5. Share other people’s content
6. Use hashtags
7. Make full use of polls, surveys, contests, and giveaways

Although each of these tips for increasing social media engagement is simple enough to implement, they can bring extremely profitable results, as you’ll see from the examples below.

#1. Share content that your audience can relate to

What are people belonging to your target audience concerned about, what are their worries, and what do they want to see? Also, what is your brand’s style that they came to expect? 

A SaaS business that sells employee time tracking software might talk about time management, work planning, productivity, etc. A restaurant could share their new cuisine, advise on the best menu item pairing, and maybe joke with customers.

In this tweet, Wendy’s plays with the meme “Sir, this is an Arby’s.”

Memes are another great way to boost engagement – and easy to pull off as well.

#2. Create conversations and follow up on trends 

When something goes viral and becomes a trend, that’s when a brand could hop on the popularity train and get a piece for itself. 

Among tips for increasing social media engagement, viral and trendy content can easily generate a lot of traffic, quickly. It works great for startups and companies that aim for explosive growth.

Semrush was one of the brands that hopped on when Squid Game went viral.

#3. Prompt readers to like, share, and comment

Ask a question to the audience or prompt readers to share their opinion on the matter in the comments. Drop a reminder to subscribe or follow. 

Social media posts without prompts miss out on the returns from this straightforward push to interact.

Brian Dean engages readers on his social media pages, by motivating them to leave their professional opinion in the comments.

#4. Show your human side (but remember to keep it speedy)

People tend to feel more comfortable when there is another human being on the other end of the line. 

There are many ways to get personal with your followers:

• Ask and answer questions.
• Respond to comments with “a human touch” – show emotions, use emojis, and choose words and phrases that carry personality in them. 
• Have your team sign off the posts with their actual names. Many brands already do social media engagement posts with sign-offs, for example, The Cowboy Museum below.
• Show your actual team members in photos or videos.
• Keep your responses quick. Hootsuite’s Saved Replies or its alternatives can help you accomplish speedy responses to popular questions without hiring more people.

The sign-off “Thanks, Tim” under many of The Cowboy Museum’s posts does not belong to their marketing team member, but rather to a security guard. And it works just fine in terms of humanized marketing. 

#5. Share other people’s content 

Don’t shy away from curated content – it’s an answer to how to increase social media engagement while saving your marketing budget. 

The best option here is sharing user-generated content – it encourages your audience (not just the creator of the content you shared, but others as well) to interact more and adds credibility to your product.

GoPro shared the post of their popular consumer, Manny the ‘Selfie Cat’, and got over 500,000 likes.

#6. Use hashtags

Branded hashtags are great for building brand awareness, driving brand engagement, and promoting events and product launches. This is also something that works well for running contests and giveaways, creating and sharing user-generated content, and joining in on trends. 

Hashtags may or may not originate from social media (like Coca-Cola’s example below). But they are a great fit with YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and other platforms. So much so that they are a must among social media engagement tips. 

There are over 630,000 posts with the hashtag #shareacoke by Coca-Cola on Instagram alone.

“Share a Coke” was originally a campaign launched by Coca-Cola in 2011 in Australia, and it became so popular that other countries went on to continue it while giving their own “personal” twist. 

#7. Make full use of polls, surveys, contests, and giveaways

Wondering how to engage with customers on social media? Try such highly interactive content types and marketing campaigns as polls, contests, surveys, or giveaways. 

People love polls and surveys, and they love to share their results. Contests and giveaways are two great ways to make your audience feel involved. 

These activities give people a chance to share their passions, become part of a like-minded community, and rightfully brag. Your social media content plan will turn more versatile by incorporating them.

For example, Designer Shoe Warehouse (a.k.a. DSW) is a national shoe retailer, and they’ve made a brilliant move by combining a giveaway with the usage of a #DSWCutLoose hashtag.

The giveaway itself asked to post a video of them dancing to the tune of Footloose with the above hashtag. The 10 winners would receive a $200 DSW gift card.

A $2,000 investment on the brand’s side earned them over 8.2 billion views on the platform to date – a result that is on par with what big brands are seeing on TikTok.

DSW Cut Loose Sandal Giveaway generated more than 8.2 billion views on TikTok at the time this post was written.

Conclusion

In this post, I revealed seven simple yet effective techniques that can help increase your brand’s social media engagement, but there are so many more you can use! 

Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are powerful tools in the marketing toolkit of many brands today. Strong social media engagement may help you get new leads and increase your ROI.

If you feel like your SMM is underperforming and you’d like to get more leads and conversions, consider giving us a call. ReVerb can help you develop a powerful social media engagement strategy that converts and retains users!