Engagements on social media are an integral part of growing your social media presence and your audience. But sometimes it’s not always clear what they are and how you should use them. 

In order to help you effectively engage with your audience, we’ve created this guide to give some more information on how they work! 

What are social media engagements?

The term engagement covers a whole variety of areas, and can even have different meanings depending on who you ask. 

Engagements can cover different actions, such as a like on Instagram or a share on Facebook. It’s basically any interaction that a follower will have with your social content, typically to show they support your business or are interested in your posts. 

Why are engagements important?

Engagements are a great way to help you understand who likes your content. Normally the more likes, shares or followers you get from your content, the better. 

You may notice that one of your posts has gotten a heap of attention and reactions from your audience, with people even clicking onto your page. 

In other cases, you may notice you get nothing from certain posts. 

Using this information, you can start to understand what your audience is looking for, so that you can start producing content that is more tailored to their interests and needs. 

You are better creating high quality, valuable content that gets a lot of engagement, than a ton of posts that don’t get you any engagement. 

You need to be proactive with your engagements 

Engagements and interactions go beyond just monitoring your social posts. 

You want to look for relevant groups on different social media platforms such as LinkedIn or Facebook, whatever is relevant to your business. 

This can be really simple, such as just scrolling through and staying informed on the issues your prospects may be having. You can answer questions, and build up your brand awareness. 

When you are doing engagements, your aim isn’t to sell. Your aim is to show your audience that you know your industry and can provide a relevant solution for them. You want to be adding value to their life. 

You don’t want to be aggressive or confrontational, you just want to create high quality content with solution-based strategies that are solving peoples problems. 

How do you get your audience involved in your socials?

Ideally you want to get your audience as involved with your socials as possible. User generated content is an amazing asset to any digital marketing strategy, and can do wonders for your branding. 

User generated content refers to any comment, post, picture or video that talks about your brand in a positive way. This could be someone buying a product from your business, and then tagging you in a photo on Instagram. 

When this happens, you want to make sure that you share this to your own page or story. This helps encourage repeat shares, and encourages other customers to do similar things. 

It’s not a one-way street. If you want to encourage this type of engagement, you may need to kickstart it by doing it with other businesses. You can do it with pretty much any business or service that you use. 

This way you encourage reciprocation. Not every business will share back, but many will, and this will help brand your business and share it with a whole new audience. 

If you can do this with people and businesses that are relevant to your own business, or where your target audience are following, then you have a very powerful branding tool. 

Doing this across your social media accounts, even just a few days a week, can significantly increase the number of people who see and interact with you online. 

Engagements are a powerful tool to start interacting with your potential customers, you just need to be making smart decisions about the social media channels you engage with online. 

To learn more about social media, go follow the Englander Davis Instagram page, where we are dedicating the whole month of March to Social Media Education!