20 Tips on How to Engage in Social Media

What is meant by engagement?

This is the level of activity of your audience on a site, blog, community or group. High engagement would mean your audience is very responsive and showing a lot of participation.

Engagement indicators would include:

• The degree of voting on your posts or article;
• The number of comments you receive;
• The number of posts your audience is sharing.
• Increased level of subscriptions
• Increased "favoriting"
• Your members are endorsing your posts

How can you increase the engagement?

• Might seem obvious however I have seen this so many times. You will get little engagement if your audience does not have the ability to make comments in your community.
• Social networks are about being social ie encouraging a dialogue. It is not just pushing information out there.
• The level of engagement in your community does take work but can be very rewarding when your community becomes a vibrant and active one.

Think about the following 20 tips to improve engagement:

1. Respect: Engagement starts with respect and an understanding of how you connect with your audience
2. Quality: Sharing quality, relevant content; so you need to write well and provide content that resonates with your audience
3. Call to Action: Think about ending your entry with a question or something that instructs your audience to act (a call to actiond).
4. Questions: Think about just asking a question as your post.
5. Personal: Although you have an audience, write like you are writing to an individual. Write as if you are speaking to one person eg "you" and "your" – make it personal. Address members by their name.
6. Timing: Think about the timing of your post. When you believe most of your audience will be on your site. When is it "rush-hour"on your site?
7. Responsive: Be responsive. Respond promptly when your audience provides feedback this includes when they vote not just when they comment.
8. Courteous. Be courteous. Saying thank you goes along way. So do thank your community often
9. Monitor. Review and monitor your comments regularly to determine the type of entries that get the most response.
10. Image. Pictures often get a lot of response. So think about using a mixture of image and text.
11. Succinct. Keep it short. These days the attention span is short. Write accordingly.
12. Fun. Ensure that you have a number of posts that are fun.
13. Great Headlines: Think about eye-catching relevant headlines
14. Success stories. I have noticed that success stories that are close to home often resonates with the audience leading to a good response.
15. Controversial items often engages the audience however you need to be a masterful facilitator to ensure you manage the conversation to a constructive endpoint or it can backfire. Having said that, if managed well it can also be a very rewarding experience for your community.
16. How To tips are great learning points and often well received. Like these tips. I hope.
17. Polls make it easy for an audience to respond and it also provides instant value by sharing the result. It is alternate way of asking a question.
18. Offers or giveaways. Providing easy to use tips on pdf file provides both a positive experience and a valuable giveaway for those interested in a given topic.
19. Contests often provides an incentive to engage.
20. Thank you- I end with this by saying it twice. Thank you goes a long way. So monitor your posts and comments and recognize your members for participating.

Now that is quite the list. Can you add anymore and make it 30 tips?!

Cheers!