Are you looking for ways to increase engagement on your social media accounts? Do you want to get more likes, shares, and comments on your posts? Well, look no further! In this article, I will share my 5 personal tips that can help you boost your social media engagement right away.
Evoke a sentiment
People generally engage with content that evokes a sentiment whether positive or negative. We often end up creating content that is just neutral and gets lost in scrolling. In order to improve engagement on social networks you need to know your target audience very well and your content needs to appeal to some emotion which promotes an action (engagement).
Here is an example to help clarify:
“Tips to improve engagement on social networks”
“Proven Tactics to improve engagement on social networks”
“Common mistakes to avoid in order to improve engagement on social networks”
It’s clear that I’m targeting people who are looking at ways to improve engagement on social media. In fact, that’s the exact keyword I’m targeting here. Out of the 3 titles, which one do you think gets the most clicks or engagement?
If your answer is the first one then you really need to continue reading this article till the end.
The second and the third titles are the ones that would get most engagement, especially the third one! This is because people are quick to react to negative sentiments. Feel free to pause for a minute and open up your social network and check out your feed.
You will see almost all posts with maximum engagement are evoking some sentiment that compels you to engage whether it is:
- Positive
- Negative
- Funny
- Motivational
- Personal Experience
- Opinion etc
We will talk more about it in detail in a while.
Evoke a sentiment with numbers
In order to further improve engagement on social network you can add numbers to your titles. I keep referring to these as titles whereas they really are called hooks, just FYI.
Adding a number adds more clarity to your content. You see, the titles above talk about “Tips, Proven Tactics and Common Mistakes”, adding a number before them will add more clarity for the audience.
“5 Tips to improve engagement on social media”
“5 Proven Tactics to improve engagement on social media”
“5 Common mistakes to avoid in order to improve engagement on social media”
We can observe that by adding a number we eliminated the neutral sentiment altogether! It’s more like 2 positives and 1 negative now, isn’t it? At the same time by adding a number, we are informing the audience that there are 5 tips, proven tactics or common mistakes that we are going to talk about.
This is important because people are busy and often look out for quick reads. By disclosing a number, you declare that the article is indeed going to be a quick read which further compels an action.
Personalize while evoking a sentiment with numbers
The one thing that people love engaging more with, is a personalized element. Rather than just sharing information, now you are sharing an experience with them.
“5 Tips that I wish I knew earlier to improve engagement on social media”
“5 Proven Tactics that I wish I knew earlier that helped me improve engagement on social media”
“5 Mistakes that I wish I had avoided earlier to improve engagement on social media”
Here we are adding an element of curiosity to our content. People will be curious to know what those things were that you wish you knew earlier. And most importantly, if they are aware of those things.
Adding personalization opens up a flood gate of engagement. Either people will add more to your content by sharing their own experience or learn from you and ensure they know exactly what needs to be done to improve engagement on social media.
If you are on LinkedIn or Twitter then you must be aware of this new trend which basically goes like this:
“It took me 6 months to learn the (social media) algorithm to grow my followers to 10K. I’ll teach it to you in less than 2 minutes!”
If you haven’t seen such a post yet, then let me tell you, it’s followed up with the most generic and basic practices to gain more followers. It’s NOT TRUE!!!!!
Every social network is super secretive about their algorithms and even in the off chance you really did figure it out and made it into public knowledge, do you really think that the social network will just allow everyone to abuse the algorithm?
However, these types of posts work really well and improve engagement!
INSTORIED helps you gauge the emotion that your content will evoke. You should check this tool out!
Offer something of value to improve engagement on social media
Often once in a while you will come across a post which promises something in exchange for a like, follow or a comment. It’s mostly a PDF or a Google Sheet which contains a compilation of something. Since I’m more into SEO (Search Engine Optimization), I come across people from my network on LinkedIn sharing a SEO checklist!
As a creator you too can promise something of value in exchange for a like, follow or comment to increase engagement. DO NOT do this as a business! Rules are very different for content creators and businesses. Make sure you have read the terms and conditions of the social network before you engage in such activity.
Worst case, you are looking at your company page being deleted!
However, it’s not exactly malpractice as long as you know your way around the system.
The biggest problem with this technique is that it can inflate the number of followers or get your post more visibility for a short duration and then it just ends. There is engagement on that post for a while but it’s really rare to see such people interacting with your newer content when you DON’T have freebies to offer.
Persuasive Storytelling
This is my favorite one and I fall for it every time! The concept is really simple but equally complex to create. You need to share your content in a story format which obviously evokes a sentiment, then builds curiosity and finally ends with a motivational quote.
There are several such posts that you must have come across, it’s story telling at its best!
It goes like this, an interaction been the one who has posted this content on social network and some random (most probably fictional) person.
The entire story is a generic story of a random person trying super hard to achieve greater things in life and no matter what’s thrown at his way he never gives up, always rises from the ashes, never breaks down etc etc….
Which is followed by a motivational quote that compels engagement from the audience.
If you read enough of them, you know they are fake and in certain cases it’s just lazy copy and paste in action. But it get’s the job done!
Understanding the social media platforms
In order to improve engagement on social networks, it is important to keep up with trends and know what’s working on which network at the moment. In short, you cannot copy paste the content on all the big 5 (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn) and expect engagement.
Obviously Instagram and YouTube is not text heavy so the content for them will definitely have to be unique (in picture and video format) where as for LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter it can be text heavy.
However, you can use what you have learnt today on all 5 but in a different manner for each.
Instagram & YouTube: Evoke a sentiment with a bold text along with bullet points and use an image that helps elevate the sentiment. For YouTube, don’t include bullet points but focus more on images and large bold text for thumbnails.
Twitter: Make use of twitter threads and convey the information in brief! Try to fit all that you are conveying in a short and crisp manner as well as try to evoke some sentiment with personalization. People on twitter like to stay on twitter and very rarely would someone click on links to your website if you chose to include them.
LinkedIn and Facebook: Well nowadays they are identical. Long gone are the days when you kept one platform for leisure and one for professional networking. You can literally use all the tactics mentioned above and even club it with an infographic, a video or a link to your website.
PS – If you’ve landed on this article which is on my website via LinkedIn then it’s proof that this tactic works!
We are finally at the end folks! Thanks for reading! Remember to evoke a sentiment the next time you post. It won’t be magic and you won’t suddenly go viral but as you master the art, it’ll be a lot easier to truly build an active and engaging audience on social networks.
