Four ways to improve your social media engagement

If you are using social media for business, you’ll already know that it can be a powerful tool for building your brand and cultivating an audience online which, in addition to supporting the public profile of the brand, can bring in potential clients from a whole new community.

Nowadays, social media is an integral part of our life, and as we can see from the 2021 October Global Statshot Report (https://wearesocial.com/uk/blog/2021/) , the number of social media users has passed the 4.4 billion mark, more than 400 million higher than it was this time last year, equating to year-on-year growth of almost 10 percent.

All this potential can be maximised by engagement. But what is engagement specifically? It is any interaction a person behind the screen has with your social media content that shows they are interested in your post and may want to support your business.

Comments, shares, likes and other actions prove your content is resonating with the people who see it, and the more “traffic” your account creates on the platform, the better!

1. Removing “Ghost” followers

Having a high number of followers is a great achievement for your brand, but it is much more important to have an active community that interacts with you. Quality must be preferred to quantity, because a strong, engaged community improves your profiles’ credibility on the view of the respective platforms’ algorithms – even if it’s not a numerically big following.

For this reason, removing your “ghost followers” can be a great move to increase your engagement rate. “Ghost followers” are all those users who are not using social media anymore, but they also include ‘bots’ and fake accounts that only slow your profile growth.

Deleting these accounts from your followers increases the percentage of active users and will contribute to your engagement rate, giving you a bigger opportunity to grow.

2. Carousels are great content

Switching to your content, it’s well-known that social media algorithms change frequently, and according to data collected in 2021, the most powerful modality to increase your visibility on Instagram, for example, is to post carousels. Carousels are Instagram posts with multiple images, and they are a great way to build engagement.

They can get 3.1x more engagement and, globally, carousels have the highest average engagement rate of all types of Instagram posts (1.01%).

3. Videos hit the mark

Also posting video content can be a smart move; posts with video receive about 38% more engagement than images. Social media channels “reward” accounts which make people stay longer on the platform, and of course watching a video takes longer than viewing a picture.

4. Saveable content

Another important action is to create saveable content. Creating reference material your audience will want to save in their collections can earn you a little engagement boost too. In fact, when your post has a good number of saves, your content will be shown more often on other accounts’ home search.

All these little actions can be a precious part of the growth of your business profile.  Great visibility derived from a good engagement rate can help your activity to grow, and with it also the opportunity to find possible customers or partners through these powerful and authoritative platforms.