17 Tips to Receiving Better Engagement with Social MediA



by Kyle Rea

Oct 12, 2016

Since many of you don't know me, I'll quickly introduce myself. I'm Kyle Rea and I've been using internet since dial-up connection and social media since AIM & ICQ era. I know my way around the internet like a doctor knows their way around a human body, and I'm here to help you "patch up" your online marketing strategies. For this particular blog, I want to tell you 17 tips and strategies for receiving better engagement with social media that I've learned over the years by trial-and-error as well as learning from the best marketers in the business today such as Neil Patel & Tai Lopez.

By reading below, I'm going to add value to your online social media strategies by explaining how to receive better engagement within your social media platforms. These are not in any particular order of importance because they are all important. Take one brick out of a foundation and it's a little bit weaker, right? Utilize all 17 tips at once for maximum results. Now please allow me to offer you some amazing advice below:

1) Time of day posted

Let's face it, the social feeds get absolutely flooded at certain times during the day, but only the most prominent and most watched content makes it to the top. However, nowadays, social platforms tweak the algorithms to "search" for the content you'd mostly likely appreciate and put it on your page. However, when you're not in front of your computer or phone (which is probably never, nowadays lol), you're somewhere else.

Let's look at social behavior patterns for a moment and realize that a majority of people are at work from 9-6 PM in their time-zones. Before that, they wake up and check their emails, cell phones, social media, etc... Then they go to the gym, shopping or what have you, and come home and get settled around 7 PM - 9 PM. On the weekends they're usually clubbing or out late night and the clubs end sometimes around 1:30-2:00 AM so while waiting for Uber/Lyft, they're on their cell phones on social media posting from that night or checking other people's posts.

Always post around the time of day people are most active on their social medias. There are guides for that, and I'll post one in another blog soon, but for now let's focus on the matters at hand.



2) Amazing Content is Key (video, photo, podcast, memes, blogs, newsletters)

Always post content that get's you (the viewer) interested. If it's dull, why waste your time? There is SO MUCH content out there nowadays that who really has time to look at it all? We usually focus on the most engaging types of content there is which is (high quality, rare, crazy, out of the ordinary, eye catching or informative content). Keep your eyes peeled for the types of content that is currently grabbing your attention or going viral and that will help you understand the value or appeal it's bringing to the audience.



3) Focus on what is currently going viral



Which leads us to what is currently going viral? Usually Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber but when they're hiding in the shadows, it's usually content that adds value, is never before seen, rare or political. This can be just about any type of niche or any type of audience, but the content most viral is the content that appeals to a mass audience.



4) Stay away from bots!

If you post on your social media and "buy" followers, watch out because most of them are fake accounts or bots and this will cause your algorithms to be disassembled. When some social media platforms algorithms (Facebook & Instagram) use algorithms to determine what you're most likely to want to view, they make their money off advertising. They don't want your content to be seen 100% of the time and even if they did, it's nearly impossible to see everybody's content all the time with the amount of content being created each and every day by all the existing social media accounts being posted on. In order to get your content seen now, you get about 15-20% retention rate but PPC (pay per click) advertising is how these businesses make most their money. So by having too many "fake followers" to make your numbers look better, you're actually losing out on a large fraction of real followers that might naturally have seen your page in the first place.



5) Post with Consistency



Be consistent with your posts. There are too many social media accounts to follow and nobody really has time to follow them all. If you post rarely, people will be less inclined to follow your pages as they get drowned out with a bazillion other accounts constantly posting cool stuff.



6) Programs for Social Media engagement



You can always use some programs to pre-schedule your posts or others to automate your Youtube channel views by targeting specific audiences you pick and sending custom made messages to them. (I won't give any specific names right now but I will spill the beans in my private training course I'm preparing. If you're interested in knowing this and more, sign up for the Newsletter below and when I get enough subscribers, I'll release the online marketing courses for you all.) Automated messages, even though custom created in a friendly manner, can sometimes can result in some people being annoyed but the positive results usually outweigh the negatives and you'll end up with a lot of labor work taken off your shoulders and a large, fresh audience in a short amount of time for a small investment.



7) Interact with Others



People love to be engaged with! They like to feel special. And many people also feel ignored by social media pages or people. They want to be engaged with your brand. If they feel like they can't get ahold of you on a personal level, there's always another brand that will. Customer service is key to maintaining a growing brand. If someone will invest in you, they want to feel comfortable and safe they invested in the right brand. There's only so much money to go around so they will always invest it with the most appreciated brands.



8) Branding (stay within your niche)



Like it says above, stay within your niche. If you're a horror blogger, appease the horror audience and demographics. If you're a cosmetics blogger or your content is cosmetic related, know your demographic and target them first. Use #hashtags and keywords that target the audience you are seeking to appeal to. Your brand will be recognized by being unique but relatable to the audience you want to appeal to. Pick a logo that people have the feeling in their gut that you want them to have. If it's a negative feeling, they might feel negative towards your brand, so try to use a branding style that gives a positive aftertaste in your audience's guts.



9) Save time by pre-planning your post

Mentioned above but there are programs to use (will give you specific names in my private class) that will allow you to pre-post all your content ahead of time on a schedule you choose. You'll have to have all your content prepared ahead of time and organized so you can quickly pre-post it with enough to last your schedule. Also, you'll need to know the best times to post on which days, which was mentioned above. People love to see on time, consistent posts from their favorite bloggers in which they can look forward to at consistent times they expect.



10) Keywords (And #Hashtags)

Embed all your content with keywords that you hope to own in the search engine results on pages such as Google & Yahoo. You would embed these keywords in editing programs such as Photoshop, Lightroom, Final Cut, etc... but the keywords can't just be basic one liners like "photography" or "marketing" because theres a bazillion searches for that a day and someone already owns that keyword. You'd have to use Google Keyword Tool and Google Adwords to figure that one out. That is a whole different conversation, which I'll talk about in my private class. The bottom line, embed your content with the keywords you want so that you can own those keywords and drive traffic to your site or social media platform. If it's #Hashtags on Instagram and such, then look for the channel most related to the content you post and used those hashtags in your posts as well as engage with the people posting on there for more engagement in return.



11) Follow a trend pattern "before" it gets big

A few years back I noticed meme's weren't as popular as they were recently. One would pop up every now and then and people would flock to it. Then all of a sudden more and more people were posting memes. Then it seemed like a third of the content on social media was memes. At the height of that, I started noticing .gifs, (very short moving images that loop continuously) were starting to be posted. The meme's died down and .gif's were about one third of the content I used to see at the top of my Facebook feed every day. Then at the height of the popularity, I started to see Prisma (a painting of your photo in variant styles), was starting to get popular, then it hit it's stride. Now it's full 360 videos...The first "new wave" of creative ideas to hit the social platforms usually became the ultra-hits before the content became saturated and it became harder to go viral with the same strategy.

What I'm trying to explain is, pay attention to what is "about to trend" and start making content for it IMMEDIATELY so people will see you as "innovative", fresh and spontaneous. People always love to see their favorite brands evolve. And your content will have a better chance going viral if you hit the market first...



12) Contests & Giveaways

Your audience ALWAYS loves free stuff! Hit them with contests and giveaways on your social media platforms! When something like Sony PS4 was giving away their free opened gaming systems, their social media pages went NUTS! Whatever you can give away, whether it's a free guide to something informative or a physical piece of merchandise, make sure it adds value and make sure to let everybody know they should like, comment and re-share for a better chance to win. Make sure to create your own custom #hashtag or keyword that isn't currently used so you can have all your audience feel the authenticity of the contest or giveaway. Make sure you have a solid deadline and that push that on social feeds as much as possible or with your friends, other bloggers, etc... You will get a lot more followers that see your other content and then become potential clients or customers.



13) Social Sharing bar on your site

I wish everybody did this. It makes it so easy to share the content onto any of your social media platforms (except Instagram, which you may only post content from your phone). See to the left of this paragraph where that share bar is with all the social media icons on it? Click one of those and share this right now so you can see what I'm talking about. You (and all businesses, brands, agencies and productions and everybody) should always have this on your website! So much simpler than copying and pasting the massive website link in the search bar and then visiting each of the five social media pages you're about to share on, creating a new dialogue, pasting the url, then posting onto your page. Just get a share bar on your social media page like the one you see there and your social engagement and clicks to your website will go up immensely! It's so easy to post something like that and your social followers will love to see easier ways to engage with you.

*Will tell you how to get one of those on your site and which one is most trusted to use in my private class.



14) Advertising

You can purchase engagement via advertising on your social media; the main three platforms being Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. There are other ways to get engagement with the same money spent that will net two various results, which I'll explain in another blog. If you're posting content that's hardly getting seen, all you need to do is pay for engagement and your problems are solved, until your bank account runs low. Then time to use the other tactics. But seriously, it is a form of engagement and it does work more effectively if you know the demographics to your target audience



15) Bloggers



Find bloggers in your niche and either trade services for services, ask them to help you out and blog about what you do or pay them. Some bloggers have massive online followings so them blogging about your services, page, social media or what have you with a hyperlink back to your pages has immense marketing power. They are a form of advertisement as well to your specific niche audience. It's a very powerful form of getting your brand out there.



16) Friends & Family (ask them to help)

Yes! They will always help when they have time, right? Have them re-share your content on their pages as well as much as possible. Their demographics may not be exactly what you want to showcase unless you're ok with the whole world being your target market... but they are more likely to share your content than anybody else because they are closer in relation with you than your general audience.



17) Share to private pages (Facebook / Forums)



Share your own content on private Facebook groups an forums on the internet to your niche market. Don't spam, by all means, but just post something here and there consistently and build your brand recognition. And try to add value somehow, which is the key ingredient to long-lasting friends, customers, clients and audience.

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In conclusion, by adding these 17 steps to you receiving better engagement on your social media, I've probably saved you hundreds to thousands of hours wasted and several thousands of dollars in investments by covering your "loose ends" of information, unless you're already an expert in social media engagement. This is merely one piece of information in the overall pie that is online digital marketing and strategies and I'm more than happy to share with you even more information in the future! I'm currently working on a guide to 51 Free Ways to Rank Up Your Instagram Profile in which I'll share with you for signing up to my newsletter below.

Or feel free to hire me for consultation or services by clicking the link below.