The growth of social media has been exponential since it’s inception in the early 2000’s. However since everybody is online these days & also with the impact of Jio, there has been a lot of increase in the content that comes on these platforms, be it brands, companies, blogs, portals, influencers or meme pages, news, aggregators etc. Due to the increase in the content flow platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram has developed complicated algorithms that decide whether a particular post will be seen by your fans or not.

It has never been more difficult to constantly come up in all your fans “News Feeds” while they are scrolling through. We would like to share some of our experience of managing different kinds of brand/company pages, from educational institutes to restaurants, from blogs to political parties, from e-commerce to MNC’s.

Since we had to generalize, some points may be more relevant to personal branding, some to brands, & some might be applicable to all. Let’s get right into it.

Tips on how to increase content engagement –

1. Post latest news, happenings, updates in your specific industry or domain

When you keep sharing the latest updates in a specific industry, slowly you become the go-to person for people to find anything new in that & people start engaging with your posts. Liking, commenting, sharing, retweeting them.

2. Post videos

With so much content on everyone’s feed, it is important today do you to differentiate yourself from others & create your own blue ocean! Posting your content in the form of videos, be it short or medium length will create a cult personal brand of yours that people will follow & associate to.

3. Trending topics

Always be the one to start conversations online in your community about any trending topic, it is not necessary to give your own opinions outright, you just need to ask the right questions & let your followers take it forward from there.

4. Ask Questions

As mentioned in the previous point, nothing drives more engagement than asking questions in your post. Try to frame it in such a way that the user feels compelled to comment their views on it.

5. Run a Poll or Quiz

Running a poll or doing a quiz urges users to interact/engage with your post. The more people engage the more reach your post will get.

6. Provide Value

Social Media is not just about posting your products, pushing users to buy. Gone are those days. You need to be constantly providing value to your users, who will not just benefit from it, they will engage & might as well share your content as well. You have to be genuinely be providing value. Think about the long-term benefit of this.

Since the attention span of the modern day consumer or social media user is so less, you literally have milliseconds before the user decides to scroll through & completely ignore your content. If you are giving some kind of incentive or offer that the user may be interested in, they might engage.

8. Know how often & when to post

By checking your page insights you can get to know which days & times are the best performings. Generally, Tuesday, Wednesday, 11:30 AM, 3:00 PM, 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM are the best days & time.

9. Don’t Promote your products directly – Build a Story!

Every kind of product or service has so much competition that it is difficult to differentiate yourself from others. That is where the power of stories come in, you need to build very strong stories around your product, how they are different, etc. Products don’t attract people anymore, stories still do!

10. Hashtags

It has been told by all the experts, hashtags can have a long lasting as well as can give quick boost benefit to your posts. However, they don’t perform as well on Facebook as they do on Instagram, Twitter or LinkedIn.

11. Host Contests

Nothing attracts the freebie mindset of today’s consumers than contests that give the users rewards for simple activities like posting a screenshot, giving a shoutout, catching something on a GIF, etc

12. Build Brand Ambassadors by promoting User Generated Content

You need to build brand ambassadors who will promote you and your content on social media by making your customers feel delighted. Ask them to give a testimonial that you will post with their picture, or a video review, or something like that. They will also share it in their network when you feature them.

13. Give your readers a Call-to-Action

So many marketers do everything right from the attractive design to the well-written content. But when it comes to closing the deal by driving users from consumers to customers they fail to inform them about the immediate next step to take that will change their life.

14. Track Results & Optimize

Goes without saying social media doesn’t work with a one answer fit all strategy. You need to have a content strategy in place, implement it for a month, optimize it, then again analyze it, see where improvements can be made, what kind of posts are getting the most responses for your brand and then publish content accordingly.

15. All Others –

For General Pages/Accounts – Post Comedy videos, memes, motivational videos, DIY videos, how to’s, daily life hacks, new innovative product videos, regional, religious, burning topics, etc.

Content like these gets a lot of shares no matter at which corner of the world you reside at. There is a very high chance of your post going viral through posting these kinds of content. You can create a mix of it by posting 1 of each type in a week.

These are some very generalized views, the strategy will differ depending on what kind of account you want to post it to, is it a personal account, business page, blog, etc

However, the essence remains the same no matter what industry, business or brand you want to promote through social media, these ideas and strategies can give you good engagement, reach and response from your fans.

We have tried to cover few very tried and tested long-term content strategy that is bound to work, & in the online social media world, you can start to see great results within a quarter. Remember we are talking about real engagement here, so when you post things that make your fans comment, you gotta ‘Talk’ to every single one of them and try to build brand ambassadors by rewarding them & make a personal space in their brain.

Do share strategies that you or your companies have used to Grow your Business?