Which types of engagement matter for your business?

Social media is all about connection, and for brands, that means audience engagement. With social data, you can understand how well your brand’s social media engagement efforts are working, as well as where you might be able to improve. And when you know which types of content and campaigns resonate most with your audience, you can grow engagement strategically and successfully.

In what follows, we’ll explain the most important types of brand engagement. We’ll also detail how you can boost audience engagement with your brand on social media by driving audience participation, involving your audience in content creation, and incorporating timely social content across all of your brand’s digital touchpoints. You’ll also find a brief run-down of best practices for engagement on social media. For more details, as well as relevant examples from brands excelling at audience engagement, download our ebook, Increasing brand engagement on social media: A guide for enterprises.

Successful audience engagement incorporates five key components: interactions, audience feedback, amplification, engagement rate, and clicks. Measuring these types of engagement with your brand is crucial to a successful social media strategy.

Interactions include reactions, likes, shares, retweets, favorites, and pins on various social media platforms. These metrics demonstrate how your brand’s overall social activity is resonating with your audience. If your social media interactions are low, that could be a signal that your content isn’t lining up with what your audience expects from your brand, and you can work to more successfully calibrate.

Audience feedback includes comments and mentions on social media platforms. They demonstrate the participation and input of your brand’s audience, and they can include both positive and negative sentiments. While it’s natural for your brand to gravitate toward positive sentiment, don’t discount the value of negative sentiment as it can offer an opportunity to demonstrate your brand’s commitment to solving problems with transparency, which can build customer loyalty.

Amplifications are shares, retweets, regrams, and repins, and they indicate how your brand’s content is resonating with your audience.

The Engagement rate of your brand’s content can be measured by total interactions as well as by the reach of your brand’s posts. With this information you can assess how effective your content is either overall or post by post.

Clicks can be tied to web analytics data to measure the actual business outcomes of your brand’s social engagement.

You can also measure your brand’s engagement with activity and reach metrics. These numbers can make it clear how many engagement opportunities your brand creates, and they can add perspective to the five metrics detailed above. Additional metrics like clickthroughs, conversions, and web traffic can present a nuanced picture of how your brand’s social efforts impact larger business objectives.

To improve your brand’s engagement numbers, it’s important to increase audience participation. Rather than viewing the content your brand publishes as one-off advertising opportunities, instead, think of your content as the building blocks of a relationship with each audience member and seek to engage them multiple times. Doing so can boost key metrics like clicks and conversions while also building trust in your brand and uncovering new leads. To encourage repeat engagement through your social media content, try the following strategies (and find additional ideas in our ebook):

• Host regular Twitter discussions with live Q&As.
• Create a hashtag to draw in new audiences who can contribute to discussions outside of official chat times.
• Reach users looking to build their knowledge base by posting more in-depth posts on Medium.

Involve your audience by featuring UGC on your brand’s social platforms. UGC has many benefits, including the credibility it lends your brand. Brands that feature UGC find that it increases the amount of time audiences spend on the brand’s website and it also increases email click-throughs and conversions. Perhaps most importantly, UGC telegraphs your brand’s commitment to partnering with your audience. To successfully incorporate UGC your brand can take the following steps:

• Offer meaningful ways for your audience to participate in digital campaigns and events.
• Bring your customers in on the ground level of campaign planning.
• Host a contest on social media tied to a new brand campaign or product launch.

Positive brand mentions from audience members can be included on your website and other digital platforms to create a robust, authentic picture of your brand. But, remember to always follow consent regulations. A few creative ways to include such content are leaderboards, polls, and fill-in-the-blanks.

• Easily find brand mentions with social media management software, like Khoros Marketing.
• Always solicit customer feedback and comments and amplify success stories on your brand’s social media channels.
• Incorporate video and livestreaming into your brand’s content strategy in order to more intimately connect with your audience.

Find further details on all of the above, additional engagement best practices, and information about how Khoros Marketing can help your brand achieve its engagement goals (and thereby accelerate sales) in our ebook.