Content engagement is the world of shares, likes, clicks, and reposts. The more engagement you have on your posts and the higher the quality of that engagement, the more likely the customer will enjoy spending time on your pages or with your content.
In some respects, high content engagement acts as a self-reinforcing cycle. Improved content quality creates more engagement, boosting even more engagement as your posts are shared and amplified.
Two companies could spend the same amount creating and marketing quality content, but one company could reap the benefits of high content engagement while the other languishes with little attention because of a weak content engagement strategy.
In today’s guide, we want to teach you how to begin improving your social media content engagement. We’ll explain what a content engagement strategy is, why it matters for your business, and how to produce one with a repeatable 10-step process.
What is a Content Engagement Strategy?
A content engagement strategy is the method your company uses to improve likes, shares, comments, and other forms of engagement with your social media content.
You may have different content engagement strategies for different platforms which emphasize different things. For example, Twitter is a primarily text-based platform, so written posts with plenty of wit and humor are the best at generating engagement. Similarly, Instagram and Facebook are focused on the visual aspects of life, so images and video reign supreme there.
The types of responses you can expect on different types of content vary. For example, text posts will likely be engaged with more text, and images can be consumed more easily and quickly than videos. Likewise, attention-grabbing posts like polls or questions can provide fast engagement boosts by giving your social media followers something to respond to.
There are a few keys to creating an effective content engagement strategy, which we’ll detail in the section below.
10 Steps to an Effective Content Engagement Strategy
Here is a repeatable ten-step process to guide you in crafting your social media content engagement strategy.
1. Identify What Success Looks Like
You need to know what you’re aiming for to hit it.
We recommend identifying a few key metrics and keeping track of how they evolve in the weeks and months after implementing your new strategy. The results of these measurements will inform what kinds of changes you need to make to your plan.
A content engagement tool like ours at Hushly can keep track of these metrics for you and even take on the job of creating content on your behalf—eliminating this stress from your job.
2. Find your Targets
Knowing your audience is the most important way to generate interest in your product. Meeting them where they are is a great way to demonstrate credibility and knowledge of your customer base.
Make sure your content is being posted to the right platforms at the right times. This will depend on who your customers are and what you’re selling.
3. Focus on Attention Grabbers (Headlines)
The philosophy of this one is simple: you can’t sell to someone who doesn’t bother to pay attention to what you’re saying. Use headlines with strong language that will draw attention to the most important information. A striking visual or a strongly worded, fascinating, or hilarious headline will increase engagement and conversions.
4. Introduce a Story
After the headline, the introduction to your product begins. Since your attention grabber promised a story, here is where you deliver. Set up introductions that follow these guidelines:
- Speaks directly to the customer
- Acknowledges the customer’s problem
- Promises to reveal how you can fix it
This natural flow of information is pleasing to customers and will help them understand how your product will add value to their lives.
5. Provide Quotes and Statistics
Quotes from industry experts, or statistics from reliable sources, are great ways to lend credibility to your product. An eye-popping statistic or highlighted quote can serve as an excellent attention grabber, as part of a smooth introduction, and in the middle of content to boost the likelihood that a customer will believe your claims.
6. Post Regularly
It’s easy to create too much or too little content all at once. You don’t need to post daily or even frequently (though that is a subjective term). It’s more important to post regularly and on a schedule that makes sense for your target audience.
This may take some work to get right: it’s not always obvious how to determine when your audience will be scrolling social media or how often they’ll appreciate content from you. Keep track of your metrics and be ready to adjust as needed.
7. Add Reminders to Share
Creating content users want to share is an important part of boosting engagement, but it’s not always easy or fast. You can supplement your quality content with encouragement and reminders to share your posts.
8. Focus on Your User Experience
Users associate every interaction with your brand with their overall customer experience. In essence, them interacting with your social media post is the same as them walking into your store: both are opportunities to maximize the customer experience and improve the likelihood they’ll spend money with you in the future.
Aesthetically pleasing and fast-loading pages, websites, and posts will improve the user experience for minimal investment. Focus on making your content feel like part of your company’s product. The value it creates will become a key part of your marketing cycle.
9. Post to Many Platforms at Once
As mentioned earlier, it’s important that you try and find customers where they are instead of hoping they’ll come to you.
Fans of your product will often want to share your post with friends but may run into problems with cross-platform sharing. For this reason, it’s important that your content (or some modified form of it) is pushed out to many platforms at once so that users can find and share content no matter where their social circle is concentrated.
10. Rethink Your Strategy Often
The final and most important step to boosting your content engagement is to rethink and optimize your strategy often. It’s highly unlikely that any strategy will be optimal from the moment it’s implemented. For this reason, you must always be willing to admit where your strategy is coming up short and look seriously at ways to resolve that.
Often can mean different things to different companies. We recommend referring back to step one if you’re unsure where to start.
Get Specific for a Wide Reach
There are thousands of unique companies and billions of unique customers, so there is no guaranteed way to boost engagement on all platforms or with all customers simultaneously.
Instead, we recommend focusing on a specific type of customer: your best customer.
Find out everything about them, including where and when they use social media, and tailor all of your content to them. You’ll still be sharing the content widely. Still, by focusing your time and attention on those most likely to become customers, you’ll maximize your ROI and make it easier to take a risk by expanding your marketing to new types of customers later down the line.
If you’re interested in how Hushly can create and manage your content engagement strategy, contact our team today!
