It can be frustrating to keep putting out stellar content on social media and yet your engagement rate keeps dropping. It might lead you to think your audience doesn’t have any interest in your brand anymore, but this can be erroneous as customers don’t buy a product or use service because of great content.
Marketing Profs posit that the average engagement rate per post in 2020 was much higher on Instagram than on Facebook and Twitter, according to research from Socialinsider.
The report was based on an analysis of engagement data (likes, comments, reactions, shares, retweets, etc.) related to 22 million posts on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter in 2020. The post was by organizations in 35 industries. The researchers compared the findings with 2019 data to determine year-over-year trends.
The average engagement rate per post on Instagram was 1.16% in 2020, compared with just 0.27% on Facebook and 0.07% on Twitter.
With these results explaining the lower social media engagement rates, you can decide to pin your engagement to a level when you learn the right tricks that drive people to like, comment and share a post.
What is Social Media Engagement Rate?
The engagement rate is a key metric in social media marketing that determines how well a piece of content performs on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Social media marketers frequently used engagement rates to determine a campaign’s performance and to show that their audience is engaged.
The engagement rate is derived by dividing the number of users who have interacted with a piece of content by the number of users who have followed the account.
How Do I Measure Social Media Engagement?
You can be hitting high numbers in terms of comments and likes, but have low numbers in conversion from leads to customers.
When measuring social media engagement, using the right analytics ensures you track the correct metrics at all levels. Hopefully, there are a lot of resource tools that can offer you great insight into various social media stats.
Although some strategic tools measure the effectiveness of these platforms, they cannot apply the same metrics on all platforms. And by gathering the right instruments, you will get access to some social media vital information.
When dealing with the most popular social media platforms, some correct metrics you can employ include:
Twitter grants you many tools that you can use to track your metrics.
You can track the following metrics on Twitter:
Engagement rate: How many engagements and impressions did it get?
Reach percentage: How many followers saw a given tweet?
Link clicks: How many click-throughs did a posted link get?
Optimal posting time: When is your audience most likely to be online? What time zone do they live in?
Facebook Analytics have a very robust and comprehensive dashboard with so many tactics to help track your audience engagement.
For Facebook, the correct metrics include:
Reach and engagement: How many people viewed your posts? Who interacted with them? Which posts did people hide? Did people report any posts as spam?
Actions: What actions do people take on your Page? How many people click your call-to-action button? How many people click through to your website?
People: What are the demographics of the people who visit your Page? (You can learn more using the Audience Insights.) When do people visit your Page? How do people find your Page?
Views: How many people are viewing your Page? Which sections are they looking at?
Posts: How are your posts performing over time?
If you have a standard business profile, it is easy to access Instagram Insights to track your Instagram engagement. This dashboard offers you all the vital social media engagement metrics you’ll need for your campaign.
You can track the following metrics on Instagram Insights:
Audience demographics: Where do they live? Are they men or women? How old?
Optimal times: When are your followers online? What days and times are they active?
Popular content: What gets hearts? What posts get comments?
TikTok
This platform keeps growing its followers heavily and you shouldn’t be the only one missing on this platform without a profile.
Insights are available to pro accounts and include the following metrics:
Audience demographics: What is my follower growth? What are they watching and listening to? Where do they live and how do they identify?
Profile views: When has my traffic spiked?
Content stats: Which videos have been viewed most this week? How long is the average playtime? How many comments, likes and shares did my video get?
How To Build Your Social Media Engagement Rate
If you want to boost your social media engagement rate, you must learn to track the right metrics for engagement, among other things you need to do that include:
Learn Your Audience
It’s tough to get people engaged if you don’t understand who you’re talking to.
The language, tone, and resources that resonate are likely going to be different for a skateboarding company versus a gardening supply shop.
Knowing your audience will also help you determine the type of content you must publish, the voice you must introduce, and the social media sites you have to be on.
Share Valuable Content
After understanding your audience and what truly matters to them, you would need to need to create content in line with their proclivities so you can get them to read and share to attract other people as well.
If you keep talking about your brand in all your content, they might get bored with getting the same information repeatedly. This will not only reduce your social media engagement but also make you lose followers.
For example, if you have a shoe company, posting the different designs of shoes you have in your stores will only give you a nominal following. However, if you added content that discussed the different ways to combine your clothing and shoes, your audience will also offer some of their own ideas while experimenting.
Whichever platform you choose to make your post on, you must understand their aspect ratio and ensure they sit perfectly with the picture.
By asking questions, spotlighting your customers, using animated GIFs and encouraging your audience to ask you questions will help put you in a dominant position.
Build Conversational Flow
Conversation is a two-way street – it must move back and forth. And while having conversations are easier for some people, it’s tougher for other individuals.
When a brand decides to have quality conversations with its people, it becomes very difficult, as a lot of attention is given to the quality of delivery the brand will present.
In every conversation, there is reactive and proactive engagement. The reactive engagement focuses on replying to messages, comments or mentions. On the other hand, proactive engagement ensures you’re the one reaching out to your followers. Whichever way you adopt, ensure you’re doing it to the best of your ability.
Respond On Time
When your followers discover it takes almost forever for your brand to recognize their comments or respond to their mentions, they’re likely to stop commenting since it would take ample time to get a fitting response.
This is poor and terrible for your social media numbers. Research agrees that speedy and concrete responses always lead to a boost in customer satisfaction while saving enough time for your team to address other vital issues.
A good practice would be to adopt the use of frequently asked questions (FAQ) sections within a part of your social media page. By doing this, you make it easier for leads to get all answers to their questions at once.
Introduce Human Element
People are more likely to interact with a brand when they feel they are interacting with a human and not a machine.
Many big businesses use this social media engagement trick by getting their social media team to set guidelines and hashtags that appeal to the humanity of their followers. This trick works vitally for people who have a heavy cult following.
Schedule Smartly
Posting content steadily will put you in an excellent position and reduce the pressure of posting at a certain period. However, it is detrimental to your brand when you have no content to post on any of your platforms on set days because of your unavailability.
To avoid these uncomfortable situations that make you look unprofessional, you must ensure you use the right schedule tools to get your content ready for upload for a specific time.
If you’re a person with multiple schedule routines, you can choose a day in the week where you will create all content for the week and schedule them for publication using any of the right tools, you can track your publications.
Go Beyond Reactions
Drawing huge numbers in terms of comments, shares, and likes is amazing. However, they form not only the aspects of your work that interest your audience.
By giving quality attention to private conversations, direct messages and story interactions, you will learn how much engagement you’re getting from your audience.
Conclusion
In social media analytics, they frequently regarded the engagement rate as one of the most crucial measures. The term “engagement rate” refers to a numerical statistic that can assess the success or failure of a piece of social media content.
If you want to increase your social media engagement rate, you must follow the laws outlined in this article. In this manner, you’ll create a visible brand that may generate incremental value on the go.