Engagement Hacks On Social Media Platforms

Social media engagement is an internet marketing buzzword that has been around for the past few years, to say the least. Ever since social media came along, marketing hasn’t been the same. Plus, it gave birth to social media marketing.

The reason why social media marketing became huge is that social media platforms kept on getting the eyeballs around. It’s no secret that wherever the attention of the consumer goes, the marketers follow it. As a result, the money gets poured in and the attention of the consumer becomes an invaluable commodity.

The interesting part is that the majority of you know the importance of social media marketing, but you don’t really have a roadmap to follow.

Let’s dive deep into social media engagement and find out how it could turn things around for you.

What’s Social Media Engagement?

Social media engagement is a communication between a brand or person with the social media followers which takes place in different shapes and forms such as comments, likes, shares, etc.

However, the ultimate goal of social media engagement is to keep the connection between a social media entity and followers intact.

Without a solid social media engagement strategy, it’ll be a one-way path where you’d keep pushing out content and all you’d hear from the other side is crickets. You might not want your social media accounts to be one of those ghost towns where no one hangs out.

Undoubtedly, putting out the best content does wonder, but it isn’t the only ingredient in the social media marketing recipe.

Besides posting content consistently on social media platforms, engagement is the next big ask for influencers and brands. They design social media strategies either to spice things up or break the ice.

Most influencers and entrepreneurs who use social media regularly usually interact with followers through live streaming or replying to their comments. This way, they get a chance to renew their connection with existing followers as well as connect with the new audience.

We don’t give much credit to social media engagement. If it wasn’t for social media engagement, a lot of our success on social media platforms wouldn’t have been possible.

Example: How I Increased My Twitter Engagement Within 28 Days

I randomly opened my Twitter analytics and noticed that my numbers are skyrocketing.

The reason why it’s happening is that I have been interacting with people on Twitter more than ever.

I didn’t share any content or do any fancy stuff. All I did was that I listen to what people were saying and respond accordingly. I noticed that by posting only 29 tweets, my tweet impressions got improved by 166.4%.

Plus, it’s also balancing out the followers drop as I’m also getting new followers. You could see followers trend is going upward. Furthermore, you could see the mentions are up 185.7%, which is huge. And lastly, the profile visits have increased by 262.4% as compared to the previous 28 days.

Sure, these aren’t staggering numbers, but I can see these numbers continue to grow as I’m having so much fun meeting industry-related people on Twitter. Had I not started this interaction a month ago, this upward trend wouldn’t have been possible.

I must point out here that social media engagement doesn’t happen on a whim. You got to put yourself out there with the righteous intent.

If you’re coming off as sales-y or greedy, it won’t work out for you. The reason I started seeing an upward trend on my Twitter reach is that I was being helpful to the community and never asking for anything in return.

Why organic engagement matters on social media?

Understanding social media engagement is crucial to figuring out how to squeeze the opportunities available out there. To better understand the social media engagement across different social media platforms, it’s important to pay close attention to the social media platforms’ algorithm.

The social media algorithm is a set of programmatic rules defined by the platform that influence the performance of the users’ content on the platform.

You may have heard about several Google algorithm updates that the search giant rolls out every year or so to make SERP more relevant and helpful for the searchers.

Figuring out the social media platforms’ algorithms might reward users with more engagement, click-through rate, and conversion.

• Authenticity: Organic engagement represents genuine interactions and reactions from real users, which are more valuable and trustworthy than artificial engagement. It reflects the true sentiment of your audience and helps build an authentic relationship with your followers.

• Relationship Building: Organic engagement allows you to build a community of loyal and engaged followers who are genuinely interested in your brand or content. This fosters meaningful connections and long-term relationships, leading to increased brand loyalty and customer retention.

• Reach and Visibility: Social media algorithms prioritize content with higher organic engagement, resulting in increased reach and visibility to a wider audience. When your content receives genuine likes, comments, and shares, it signals to the algorithm that your content is relevant and valuable, leading to higher visibility in users’ feeds.

• Cost-Effective: Organic engagement is essentially free, whereas paid engagement such as sponsored posts or ads require a budget. Focusing on organic engagement can be a cost-effective way to drive meaningful results and maximize your return on investment (ROI) on social media efforts.

• Audience Insights: Organic engagement provides valuable insights into your audience’s preferences, behaviors, and feedback. By analyzing the comments, messages, and interactions, you can gain a deeper understanding of your audience’s needs and preferences, which can inform your content strategy and marketing efforts.

Top Engagement Factors for Social Media Platforms in 2023

Let’s cut to the chase. Wouldn’t you be interested in some data-backed social media tactics that could turn things around for you?

Here are some key factors that affect social media engagement on top-tier social media platforms:

Facebook Engagement Factors

• Best days to post

It’s a known fact that every social media platform is different than the other one. However, the demand for “great content” and supply of “attention in response to great content” is the common secret sauces across all social media platforms.

Influencer Marketing Hub dug deeper into various statistics and found that the best days to post on Facebook are Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday.

ContentStudio is a popular social media management dashboard that is used by experts and brands to publish hundreds of thousands of social media posts every month.

The statistics from ContentStudio show that Friday has also been a high-engagement day besides Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday.

You shouldn’t be surprised if your numbers tell a different story. Social media engagement may vary from industry to industry.

• Content posting frequency

Since we’ve established that every social media platform is different than the other one, it’s important to know the content frequency for each platform is different as well.

You may have to post videos on YouTube at least once a week or put out content on Instagram three to four times a week.

According to a source, it’s not viable to post more than once or twice per day on Facebook. Plus, a Hubspot study revealed that Facebook pages with less than 10,000 followers noticed a 50% drop in engagement by posting more than once per day.

Furthermore, you could check out the social media analytics to find out how your Facebook posts have performed in the past.

ContentStudio has an Analytics section dedicated to providing you with all the statistics related to your social media content performance.

Twitter Engagement Factors

• Twitter users demographics

Twitter is a social media giant with 330 million monthly active users. It is the go-to social media platform for updates, news, and communication for millions of social media users across the globe regardless of their industries.

Twitter has a rather simple user engagement methodology. People post tweets and you could respond to their tweets either by sharing their tweets or replying to their tweets.

One of the aspects of users’ engagement on Twitter is the user demographics. If you’re trying to reach out to the 10 to 20 years old, you should try out TikTok instead.

It’s important to figure out where your audience exists. Otherwise, you’d find it hard to get any type of engagement activity whatsoever.

According to this source, 42% of Twitter users are aged between 18 and 29, whereas 27% fall in the 30-49 age bracket. Furthermore, 18% of the Twitter users are aged between 50 to 69 and 7% of the user base lies in the 65+ age category.

• Trends and meme formats

When you’re trying to maximize social media engagement, milking every trend you come across on social media is the way to go.

Does anyone remember the Ice Bucket Challenge? It went crazy as celebs, politicians, actors, philanthropists, and influencers hopped in to be a part of it.

When it comes to Twitter, capitalizing on what’s trending using the hashtags would allow you to jump right into it. It’s a sure-fire way to increase social media engagement because people want to know what’s trending and some of them want to respond to what others are saying.

It’s pretty obvious that social media engagement skyrockets when people want to jump on the bandwagon no matter how educated they are on the issue.

If you want to make it happen for your brand, then first include Twitter in your social media marketing strategy and then keep an eye on the latest trends.

Instagram: Social Media Engagement Factors

• Hashtags increase content discoverability

SocialInsider partnered up with Quuu to do an Instagram hashtags study. They looked through around 649,895 Instagram posts from over 6,700 accounts of different sizes and found out that using the Instagram hashtags in the right areas makes all the difference.

The research also revealed that Instagram hashtags in the description perform better than the ones in the first comment.

Instagram is more of a visual platform that puts creativity on a pedestal. It doesn’t matter whether you’re good at landscape photography or making incredibly satisfying art videos. The audience on Instagram goes after the content that portrays talent, innovation, and skill.

However, there are social media engagement factors that multiply your attention manyfold if you know how to do it. Using the Instagram hashtags correctly or replying to the comments is the easiest way to make the most of your follower base.

We’ve written a complete guide on how to use social media hashtags that you must check out.

• Millennials prefer Instagram

The fact that Instagram is the most popular social media platform among millennials shouldn’t come as a surprise.

If you must know, millennial is the generation born between 1981 to 1996. It’s no secret that millennials and Gen Z generations are vital to the growth, popularity, and success of any social media platform.

According to the social media trends, Millennials and Gen Z’s favorite social media platforms are Facebook and Instagram. Furthermore, Instagram turned out to be the preferred social media platform for the 25-34 age bracket, especially the females.

Since we’re talking about social media engagement, and it doesn’t happen until you figure out where your audience exists. Now you know Instagram is the platform of choice for millennials, you can carve out your social media strategy accordingly.

The takeaway from this point is that if a brand’s target audience is millennials, then Instagram should be their go-to social media platform for attracting, engaging, and converting the audience into paying customers.

Pinterest and YouTube: Social Media Engagement Factors

• Female-dominant social media platform

Pinterest is an image and video-sharing platform known for attracting a female audience. Even though, the male audience has also registered their existence over the past few years, which plays a vital role in the growth of the platform.

No doubt that Pinterest is a female-dominant social media platform as 72% of the ad audience is female, which shows the potential for female-dominating niches such as fashion, home and decor, entrepreneurship, and health.

The total active monthly users on Pinterest reached 463 million at the start of 2023. Furthermore, Pinterest has also added new countries to its advertising program, resulting in attracting more businesses towards the ad platform.

• YouTube is the second most used social platform in the US

YouTube has been around for over 15 years now, and over the past decade, the video platform has managed to build a strong user base across the globe.

The monthly active users of YouTube in 2023 are 2.6 billion. According to a report, Facebook and YouTube are the most popular social media platforms in the US.

These statistics suggest that if you’re targeting US adults, then don’t ignore the video-sharing giant that is also considered the second most used search engine on the internet.

So these were a handful of social media engagement factors that brands, entrepreneurs, and influencers should keep in mind before crafting their social media strategies.

How to Increase Social Media Engagement

If you’re curious to know the specifics of how to increase social media engagement on top-notch social media platforms, then keep reading this piece.

Here are four steps to increasing social media engagement on almost every major social media platform:

• Figure out the best time and day to post

Social media engagement doesn’t happen on a whim, but instead, it takes time, energy, and sweat to get there. Figuring out when to post on social media matters in social media engagement.

If you’re posting on social media when your audience isn’t there, you might not get any traction no matter how good your content is. It’s not rocket science to figure out the best days and times to post on social media platforms.

All you need is to dig deeper into your social media analytics and see the time and day of your best-performing social media posts.

2. Analyze what type of content drives more attention

When you’re striving to increase your social media engagement, it’s essential to pinpoint the type of content that drives more attention.

There may not be hard and fast rules for content analysis; all you need is to go through your social media analytics and see what posts are doing better than the rest.

You may want to look through the following options:

• Are they natively uploaded videos on Facebook?
• Are they text-only Tweets regarding your industry?
• Are they quote images on Instagram?
• Are they poll on LinkedIn?

If you notice more engagement across all posts in the specific content type, you could double-down on that type of content and make the most of the social media attention.

ContentStudio has an analytics feature for analyzing your popular social media posts, which you may want to check out.

3. Don’t shy away from starting conversations

It’s highly unlikely that something happens if you just hit publish and wait for something to happen for you. On the contrary, you need to put effort into the process of increasing social media engagement.

The easiest way to increase engagement is by starting conversations. You can do it in several ways regardless of the social media platform, for instance:

• Ask a question
• Tell a story
• Teach a lesson

• Share a useful piece of content

Spencer Haws is an internet marketer and blogger. He has been running his Niche Pursuits blog for several years.

He created the Niche Pursuits Facebook group back in 2015. Not only does he post his blog content once in a while, but he also shares useful information with the audience.

The fascinating part is that he still shows up in the Niche Pursuits Facebook group after all these years and starts conversations. Had he neglected his Facebook group after a while, it wouldn’t have been as successful as it is now.

4. Mention friends or followers in the posts

Have you ever considered tagging or mentioning your friends or followers? If you haven’t had a chance to try this social media growth hack, then let me explain it to you.

When you tag someone on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, or Twitter, it notifies them that you mentioned them.

Doing so helps them pop on social media or at least get some eyeballs around their profiles. This way, you help them reach a new audience. Plus, some of them may reciprocate this process and this is where it becomes a win-win situation for both parties.

If you follow social media influencers on any social media platform, you’d notice that they often tag other influencers and vice versa.

These experts and influencers know how social media algorithms work, so they reverse engineer their strategies to get more views, reach, and attention.

Since we’re trying to increase engagement on social media, there is no better way to do that than mentioning your colleagues, friends, and followers in your social media posts.

Conclusion: How to Cash in on Social Media Engagement Factors

We all want the secret sauce of everything we come across, but it’s not always the shortcuts that put you over the line. Instead, some tried-and-tested strategies that may take a little longer to show results make all the difference.

Social media is a lot of fun when you know what to talk about and who you should reach out to — otherwise, it becomes overwhelming to keep up. As we discussed the top social media factors that we think could be pivotal in your social media marketing for 2023 and beyond, it’s also necessary to reveal that there is no wrong or right way to succeed on social media.

Moreover, we think a bunch of stats or strategies shouldn’t stop you from exploring new methods and tactics to dominate the social media space. If you’re ready to embark on your social media marketing journey, then besides understanding all the algorithmic tactics, our simple advice would be to test out new ways to help your audience.

If this MESSAGE doesn’t ring a bell, then let me elaborate on this. If your entire focus is on PUSHING social media fans to check out your content, you’re not going to drive more people to your website. On the other hand, if you’re sharing USEFUL TOOLS or RESOURCES right away on social media that are extremely helpful for your fans, then some of your fans might want to check out your website or subscribe to your email list or follow you across multiple social media platforms.