Growing social media engagement

Social media is known for being a noisy place, and never more so than now with people staying inside, spending a lot their free time online.

Now is an important time to be online. With this in mind, we thought we would share some tips with you for using social media to maintain your brand awareness.

Start by creating a social media plan that ensures there is a regular stream of activity on your channels. Use a scheduling tool like Creator Studio (for Facebook and Instagram), Hootsuite or Loomly to allow you to schedule posts for your social media channels in advance.

However, during these constantly changing times make sure you regularly review your scheduled posts. You don’t want a post to appear tone-deaf to what’s happening in the wider world when it goes live two weeks after you originally scheduled it. When drafting your posts, don’t just copy and paste your content across each platform. It’s highly likely that the audience between platforms will vary and, therefore, your post for one platform needs to be tweaked for another.

For content on Twitter and LinkedIn, make sure you include relevant hashtags. The purpose of a hashtag is to grow the reach of a post and increase the chances of it getting seen by the right audience. Take time to research each hashtag you want to use and discover how many followers it has and how often it is used.

Incorporate emojis where appropriate too. Once viewed as childish or kitsch, the use of emojis was viewed with caution. However, that has changed drastically in recent years, with some even claiming that emojis increase engagement - recent statistics suggest that social posts that include emojis receive around 15 per cent more interaction.

When you are sharing content from other websites, make sure you tag the publication and the author if possible. They may be inclined to share your post that is supporting their content – all in all helping to boost your engagement. Tag other relevant parties too: you could tag another business, asking them to input your thoughts, or tag a member of your team who shared the article with you.

Don’t be afraid to actively encourage engagement too. Ask questions of your followers, run polls and give them a reason to share or like your content. At Media Matters we always focus on what ‘value’ social media content is offering to an audience – is it warning people? Informing them? Providing entertainment? If you always aim to offer value through your content you will naturally be