20 Tips on How to Engage in Social Media
Add bookmarkWhat 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:
- Respect: Engagement starts with respect and an understanding of how you connect with your audience
- Quality: Sharing quality, relevant content; so you need to write well and provide content that resonates with your audience
- Call to Action: Think about ending your entry with a question or something that instructs your audience to act (a call to actiond).
- Questions: Think about just asking a question as your post.
- 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.
- 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?
- Responsive: Be responsive. Respond promptly when your audience provides feedback this includes when they vote not just when they comment.
- Courteous. Be courteous. Saying thank you goes along way. So do thank your community often
- Monitor. Review and monitor your comments regularly to determine the type of entries that get the most response.
- Image. Pictures often get a lot of response. So think about using a mixture of image and text.
- Succinct. Keep it short. These days the attention span is short. Write accordingly.
- Fun. Ensure that you have a number of posts that are fun.
- Great Headlines: Think about eye-catching relevant headlines
- Success stories. I have noticed that success stories that are close to home often resonates with the audience leading to a good response.
- 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.
- How To tips are great learning points and often well received. Like these tips. I hope.
- 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.
- 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.
- Contests often provides an incentive to engage.
- 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!