5 Social Media Publishing Tips to Increase Engagement

Is your brand just broadcasting content or truly engaging with your customers and prospects?

Chances are you’re just pushing out content. A Nielsen study found that 95% of brands are stuck in “broadcast” mode — not engaging customers on social media channels.¹ This number is backed up by a recent analysis by ComBlu of eight industries and 85 Fortune 1000 companies, who found that only 2% of brands consistently respond to customers’ posts.

Your ability to engage customers is vital to the health of your brand and imperative to meeting and exceeding your customers' expectations. Stop broadcasting content and get “unstuck” by following these five social media publishing tips to increase engagement (read our Social Media Pocket Guide for additional insight).

Chances are you're not sifting through mountains of data to determine when your audience is most likely to be online before deciding when to publish — you’re taking your best guess. The time for speculation and stress is over. With the latest social media marketing tools, automatically select the best time to publish each piece of content using a complex algorithm based on the social media network, your brand’s past engagement history, and behavior of your audience.

Auto-scheduling not only frees up your time to focus on other activities like interacting with your audience in real time, but smart scheduling can also lead to a 25% increase in engagement.

We’ve known for years that email list segmentation to provide more relevant content improves engagement and conversions. But most marketers still engage in a one-size-fits-all approach to social media publishing. Tailoring your content and visuals to your diverse audience can yield measurable engagement results. Here are two easy ways to get started:

• By matching emails with Twitter handles, identify inactive customers to create a tailored audience for remarketing. Re-engage them with a paid Twitter strategy by offering an exclusive discount or incentive to visit your website.²
• With Facebook’s new Preferred Audience tool, deliver the right content to the right audience by targeting your organic posts to your preferred audience. According to Facebook, “with Preferred Audience, interest tags help prioritize posts that are most likely to be engaging for a person without limiting visibility for others.” ³

Storytelling is a powerful way to engage. While most brands understand the value of visually driven content, they’re still creating one-off posts and neglecting to use sequential posts to tell their story. To increase engagement, create an ongoing narrative that will entice your followers to return for more. Follow these common traits from top social media storytellers to drive deeper connections with your audience:

• Publish content around “tips and tricks” that helped consumers learn new skills or how to better use your products and services.
• Provide links to deeper storytelling platforms such as blogs or a website.
• Riff off of current happenings such as big sporting events or holidays.
• Make consumers and influencers part of the story by retweeting their posts or featuring them as main characters in a story.
• Feature causes that are inspirational or meaningful.
• Show “behind the scenes” shots and videos.

You’ve seen it before — a tweet that’s cut off mid-sentence with a link to Facebook, a Facebook status update with way too many hashtags, a LinkedIn thumbnail that’s too blurry to read. From ideal image dimensions to audience demographics, every social media platform is unique and should be treated as such.

Using the same messaging on every social platform is a surefire way to plummet your engagement rate. Take time to understand the best practices for each platform and include them in your content publishing plan.

User-generated content (UGC) remains the most powerful source for inspiring consumer engagement and conversion, ultimately leading to trust and loyalty. In fact, social campaigns that incorporate UGC see a 50% lift in engagement. When you leverage UGC, you invite consumers to be part of the brand experience, which engages them and provides content for your marketing.

Curating high-quality content is time-intensive, luckily there are social media marketing tools that can assist you in surfacing the best content for your brand. Here are just a few:

• BuzzSumo lets you see content that is highly shared on social media based on the keywords or websites you enter.
• Lithium (now Khoros) data-driven recommendations maximize engagement by helping brands easily discover content worth sharing and publish it quickly.
• Olapic scours and pulls brand-related visual UGC content from Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube and feeds them to marketers to use in their own ads.

For more information on increasing engagement on social media, read our Social Media Pocket Guide.

¹ Lithium Whitepaper - "The State of Social Engagement 2017"

² audiense Article - "7 Ways To Drive Revenue With Smarter Twitter Segmentation And Targeting"

³ Facebook Article - "Audience Optimization"